ELO is delighted to announce the addition of three new Board Members: Lyle Skains, Shanmugapriya T, and Zach Whalen. Each will contribute an extensive set of skills, expertise, and creativity to the all-volunteer board. At the same time, we say farewell and thanks to outgoing Board Members Anna Nacher and Mark Sample who have contributed so much to our community. ELO President Caitlin Fisher said to the new members, “We are thrilled to have these new Board Members join us and look forward to working with them. I want to express gratitude for their willingness to serve and admiration for the talents they bring. ” ELO Board Members serve on three-year renewable terms.
Below are biographies of our newest members! The full Board is here.
Lyle Skains is an award-winning researcher and creative practitioner in Creative Digital Writing and Science Communication. She conducts practice-based research into writing, reading/playing, publishing digital and transmedia narratives, and how these can be used for health and science communication. Her recent digital fiction includes ‘No World 4 Tomorrow’ for the You & CO2 project, and ‘Only, Always, Never’ for the Infectious Storytelling project; both works were designed to effect social change. She is the founder of Wonderbox Publishing, which publishes speculative digital fiction, aiming to explore innovations in digital and online publishing and creativity. She is also the coordinator of the New Media Writing Prize, and an editor of the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 4. Her digital fiction can be found at lyleskains.com; articles in Convergence, Digital Creativity, and Computers and Composition; and books with Cambridge UP (Digital Authorship), Emerald (Using Interactive Digital Narrative for Health and Science Communication) and Bloomsbury (Neverending Stories: The Popular Emergence of Digital Fiction). ‘Neverending Stories’ was awarded the N. Katherine Hayles Prize for Criticism in Electronic Literature in 2023 by the Electronic Literature Organization. Currently an Associate Professor in Literary Media and Health & Science Communication at Bournemouth University, she has demonstrated remarkable engagement within the electronic literature community by actively participating in numerous initiatives.
Shanmugapriya T is an Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities and Digital Literature in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at IIT (ISM) Dhanbad. She was a Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of Toronto Scarborough (UTSC) (2022–2024) and an AHRC Postdoctoral Research Associate at Lancaster University, UK (2020–2021). During her postdoctoral work at Lancaster and UTSC, she applied digital humanities techniques to study environmental degradation, particularly water systems in Coimbatore, South India, from British colonial times to the present. She created an interactive map using Leaflet and ArcGIS to track the transformation of water tanks in British India’s Coimbatore region and developed Lost Water, Remainscape!, a digital poetry that blends 3D environments, maps, and oral testimonies. She curated her students’ digital-born creative works on her website. Shanmu’s research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of digital humanities, digital environmental studies, and digital literature, focusing on South Asia, colonial and postcolonial studies, text mining, mapping, and digital-born creative works. She earned her Ph.D. in Indian English Literature and Digital Humanities at the Indian Institute of Technology Indore, India. She is an interim executive committee and Governing Body member of DHARTI, as well as a Research Fellow and member of the Electronic Literature Organization, and was a SPARC Fellow at Lancaster University (2019). She is one of the Peer Reviews Editors of the journal Digital Humanities Quarterly. Shanmu curated the first Indian Electronic Literature Anthology Volume 1 along with Nirmala Menon, Justy Joesph and Deborah Sutton.
Zach Whalen is an Associate Professor at the University of Mary Washington where he teaches courses on creative coding, game studies, comics, and electronic literature. He is the co-editor (with Chris Foss and Jonathan W. Gray) of Disability in Comic Books and Graphic Narratives and (with Laurie N. Taylor) of Playing the Past: History and Nostalgia in Video Games. He is completing a scholarly monograph on computer-generated literary and artistic books. In addition to research and writing about electronic literature, Zach is a practitioner of computational creativity including tiny digital poems in Taper, several dozen artistic or literary Twitter bots (all now defunct), and the graphic novel An Arthrogram. He is also an annual contributor to NaNoGenMo (National Novel Generation Month) and a member of the Community Advisory Board for If, Then: Technology and Poetics.