ELO is pleased to announce the addition of three new members to its Board of Directors: Lai-Tze Fan, Erika Fülöp, and Reham Hosny.  These top scholars and artists extend ELO’s global representation as they reside in Canada, England, and Egypt, respectively.

ELO President Leonardo Flores welcomed the new members, saying, “We had a great community response to our first-ever open Call for Nominations resulting in a wonderful lineup of dedicated scholars and artists in the field. After much deliberation and keeping in mind our goal of continuing to diversify the Board of Directors, we chose three great scholars who will bring new energy and perspectives to our governing body. I am looking forward to collaborating with our new Directors! And huge thanks to all who put their names forth or accepted nominations. We will seek opportunities to get you involved in our projects!”

ELO has an all-volunteer board of members who serve renewable three-year terms. These new directors, for the first time, were drawn from a set of nominations from ELO’s members.  The organization continues to work to make this process more inclusive and transparent and is very pleased with the results.

Meet the new Board Members:

Lai-Tze Fan

Dr. Lai-Tze Fan is an Assistant Professor of Technology and Social Change in the Department of Sociology and Legal Studies at the University of Waterloo, Canada. Fan is an interdisciplinary researcher who combines the fields of media studies, science and technology studies, digital storytelling, critical design, and cultural studies. Her research appears in the journals Mosaic, Convergence, Media Theory, and elsewhere.

Fan is also a practitioner of art installations, digital textuality and writing, interactive games, and critical making, with 15 solo and collaborative works of research-creation. With Nick Montfort, she created “Dial” (2020), a generative emoji-embedded poem representing networked, distant communication. With Anne Sullivan and Anastasia Salter, she created Masked Making (2021), a generative work that captures both the imagined making and fragments of text that represent the invisible faces, hands, and labour of women’s mask making during the COVID-19 pandemic. Also of note are video games for children’s health research that Fan helped design with the international Breathing Games Commons, as well as a smart phone application called Global Urban Wilds (2021) that she helped develop for the city of Montréal.

Fan currently serves as an Editor and the Director of Communications for the open-access journal electronic book review and Editor of the multimodal journal the digital review. She edited a special double issue of both journals called “Critical Making, Critical Design” (September 2021), which was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada. She also co-edited a special journal issue of electronic book review on “Canadian Digital Poetics” (February 2021). She is Co-Editor of the collection Post-Digital: Dialogues and Debates from electronic book review (Bloomsbury 2020).

Erika Fülöp

Erika Fülöp is Senior Lecturer in French Studies at Lancaster University. She previously held a Lectureship at New College, Oxford (2012-13) and an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship at the Interdisciplinary Center for Narratology at the University of Hamburg (2013-15). Since her doctoral thesis and first monograph on Proust and philosophy titled Proust, the One, and the Many: Identity and Difference in À la recherche du temps perdu (Oxford: Legenda, 2012), she has been exploring increasingly recent and increasingly diverse modes of writing and authorship that question and expand the concept of writing and literature, including interferences between print books and networked writing, the impact of social networks on authorship, video writing on YouTube, and digital poetry and its translation. She has run several projects and conferences around these subjects, including Screening the Literary (2016-17) and The Creative Web of Languages (2017-19). In 2020 she completed a monograph co-authored with Gilles Bonnet and Gaëlle Théval on French creative literary experimentation on YouTube (‘Qu’est-ce aue la LittéraTube?’), and in 2021, adventured into learning to code & co. thanks to an EPSRC grant in order to carry out truly interdisciplinary research and analyses of electronic literature. You can find her research and learning diary here.

Reham Hosny

Dr. Reham Hosny is an Assistant Professor in English literature at Minia University, Egypt and previously, she was a Lecturer at the University of Leeds, UK. Her research focuses on creating links between the well-established western electronic literature communities and the growing digital culture innovators of other underrepresented communities. She is particularly interested in investigating the cultural, social, and political contexts of Arabic and Anglo-American electronic literature. Additionally, she is a creative writer. She is directing arabicelit, the first initiative focusing on globalizing Arabic electronic literature in the English language. She is an international consultant for the Electronic Literature Organization’s ELC4. She was also a co-organizer of the first international conference on Arabic electronic literature at RIT-Dubai, Feb. 25-27, 2018. She initiated and co-delivered the first electronic literature workshop in the Arab World and co-curated the first electronic literature exhibit in the Arab World at RIT-Dubai in 2018. She initiated the first autobiographical collection of Arab electronic literature authors on the ELMCIP knowledge base in 2015. She spent two years as a visiting scholar at College of Liberal Arts at RIT-New York and West Virginia University. She is an invited speaker in many international conferences, workshops, and symposiums at different places around the world such as the USA, the UAE, the KSA, Canada, Scotland, Norway, Egypt, Jordan, and the UK. She is a member of different international research networks such as the Intersections, Feminism, Technology & Digital Humanities network (IFTe) funded by UKRI-AHRC and the Irish Research Council. She is also a member of the Global AI Narrative (GAIN) network in the MENA region. Besides her scientific achievements, she received the Ihsan Abdel Quddous Literary Prize for short story writing for her short story collection Amma Ba’d (and thereafter) (2012). She also wrote Al-Barrah (The Announcer), the first Arabic artificial intelligence novel, in collaboration with Mohamed A. Nasef (2019, 2021). For more information, you can visit her personal website.

Leaving the Board

After years of service, a few Board members have also stepped down, including Helen Burgess, Serge Bouchardon, Stuart Moulthrop. We thank them for their service and their generous contributions of their time and talent.

The ELO Board of Directors is pleased to announce that it is funding two proposals for its 2020 Emerging Spaces for E-Lit Creations initiative. The two winning proposals are Filter by Sarah Whitcomb Laiola and Caleb Andrew Milligan and (RE)VERB by John Barber, Andrew Demirjian, Dahlia Elsayed, Jeremy Hight, and Henna Wang.

With this initiative, the Board seeks to encourage the creation of new spaces (zines) that curate, promote, and explore a greatly expanded set of works on social media and mobile platforms. Its goal is to stimulate and support the creation and dissemination of quality electronic literature in a greater variety of spaces with zines that reach and cultivate new audiences.

The Board is grateful for all the teams that submitted proposals and encourages those who were not funded to consider applying to future ELO initiatives.

Here are some details on the two awarded proposals.

Filter

An Instagram Collaboratory for E-Lit

Filter​ will be a critical-creative publication that welcomes a variety of works and materials to further the creation and circulation of e-lit both optimized for and disruptive of Instagram, as well as critical scholarly and pedagogical engagement with this developing genre. We embrace the creative and critical opportunities latent in specific features of Instagram; Stories, Boomerangs, Reposts, interactive stickers, 10-frame images posts, and short videos all offer opportunities to expand possibilities for e-literary creation and criticism.

Filter’s ​mission is to support the circulation and promotion of works of e-lit that are optimized for, engage with, and/or disrupt the poetics of that platform.

Filter’s senior editors, Sarah Whitcomb Laiola and Caleb Andrew Milligan, will be assembling an editorial team and an advisory board in preparation for launching the ‘zine.

(RE)VERB

an audio augmented reality zine dedicated to the interplay between sound, electronic literature, and the experience of environment

(RE)VERB is an audio augmented reality zine dedicated to spatially conceived electronic literature projects that explore the aesthetic possibilities of sonically delivered language engaging with the physical and corporeal experience of the environment. (RE)VERB will release two issues per year with the editorial board and guest curators selecting the most compelling pieces that engage global e-lit writers in this emerging medium. 

(RE)VERB will partner with Gesso, creators of an innovative mobile application that enables immersive location-based audio experiences to bring the peer reviewed creative visions of selected authors to life. The free Gesso app provides an interactive map with geographic coordinates, audio, images and video artwork. Readers, listeners, participants can engage with the contents either in situ or through recordings. 

The initial editorial board consists of artists and writers who work with language, mapping and space including John Barber, Andrew Demirjian, Dahlia Elsayed, Jeremy Hight and Henna Wang from Gesso.

Leonardo Flores, ELO President, had this to say about the initiative: “I’m so thrilled about these two proposals! Each ‘zine will focus on a different sense– sight and sound– and will create opportunities for people to publish quality electronic literature designed for three major platforms– Instagram, iOS, and Android– and will be able to cultivate audiences that have no idea what electronic literature is, but are creating it and consuming it. We have two great teams that will help us expand the field and learn valuable lessons from their experiences.”

ELO plans to award more grants to support e-lit publications in the coming years in fulfillment of its mission to support the development of digitally born literary works.

ELO is pleased to announce the addition of two new Board members: Alex Saum-Pascual and Erik Loyer.  As prominent scholars and practitioners, both Alex and Erik have shaped electronic literature, now they will help shape ELO.

Alex Saum-Pascual is Associate Professor of Spanish and New Media at the University of California, Berkeley, where she teaches Contemporary Spanish Literature and Culture (20th and 21st Centuries) and Electronic Literature (Digital Humanities). She is also part of the Executive Committee of the Berkeley Center for New Media. Her academic work on digital media and literature in the Spanish-speaking world has been published in Spain, Mexico and the United States in the Digital Humanities Quarterly, the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, the Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies and Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, among others. Her monograph, #Postweb! Crear con la máquina y en la red (Iberoamericana-Vervuert, 2018) explores the influence of electronic writing technologies on both printed and born-digital books. As an artist, she is interested in the intersection of female representation in digital media and online spaces as these relate to offline environments in the Anthropocene. Her digital artwork and poetry has been exhibited in galleries and art festivals in the United States and abroad. She is currently a 2020 Poetry Fellow at the Arts Research Center, working on her latest electronic literature work, corporate poetry.

Erik Loyer makes digital artworks and creative tools that marry the visual language of comics with motion graphics and musical performance. He founded the interactive label Opertoon in 2008 to explore this territory, releasing the interracial love story Ruben & Lullaby, the touchscreen meditation Strange Rain, and the digital graphic novel Upgrade Soul, which have garnered critical acclaim and over half a million downloads. Through Opertoon, Loyer has also originated a pair of creative tools—Panoply for digital comics, and Stepworks for electronic literature—which have been utilized in classrooms and workshops across the United States and Europe, as well as in commercial releases. He is active in the digital humanities as Creative Director of the popular scholarly publishing tool Scalar, and as the designer and developer of over a dozen interactive non-fiction works in collaboration with leading scholars, artists, and organizations including the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. Loyer is also co-founder and Chief Experience Officer of TunesMap, a media startup that delivers cultural context around streaming music. A two-time Webby Awards Official Honoree, his work has been exhibited in the Americas and Europe, included in the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 2, and he has been commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

The ELO Board of Directors is a hardworking group of volunteers.  For a full list of members see our People page.

We are pleased to welcome our newest member of the ELO Board of Directors, Anna Nacher.  Newcomers to ELO 2019 in Cork were welcomed by Anna’s tweets, but Anna is no newcomer to ELO or electronic literature.  Her contributions to the field extend into the areas of locative media imagery and virtual reality.  She most recently enjoyed a tour as Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence in Creative Digital Media at Winona State University.

The ELO Board is entirely made up of volunteers who serve for renewable 3-year terms. For more information on Board Members, see our people page.

Below is Anna’s bio:

Anna Nacher – an associate professor at the Institute of Audiovisual Arts, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland; Vice Editor-in-Chief for Arts & Cultural Studies Review (Przegląd Kulturoznawczy); and the 2019 Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence in Creative Digital Media program at Winona State University (USA).

Her research interests include media art, electronic literature, media theory and environmental humanities. She is currently pursuing a 3-year long research project on the post-digital imagery grant from Polish National Science Centre (entitled, “The aesthetics of post-digital imagery: between new materialism and object-oriented philosophy,” ). The author of three books in Polish; the newest one published in 2016 focuses on a locative media imagery. A reworked version of one chapter has appeared as “Internet of things and automation of imaging: beyond representationalism” in communication+1, vol. 5 (2016). She has published numerous articles in journals and chapters in edited volumes including Hyperrhiz, Electronic Book Review, communication+1. The most recent publication: VR – the culture of (non)participation? “Reframing the participative edge of virtual reality” in Cultures of participation: Arts, Digital Media and Cultural Institutions: Eriksson B., Stage C., Valtysson B. (eds.)  (Routledge 2019).

She is also a part-time musician and a passionate gardener in a tiny permaculture farm located in Slovakian Carpathians.