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Academic Portfolio

Education

2021 - Present

Howard University | PhD Candidate, English Language and Literature

Dissertation: Racial Recursivity: Play, Race, and History in Contemporary Video Games

2020

New York University | MA in English Language and Literature

MA Thesis: Literary Alibi: The Consumption of African American and Dalit Literature

2017

Texas Wesleyan University | BA Summa Cum Laude and Departmental Honors in English

Research Interests

My research and teaching interests include Video Game Studies; Game Studies; Critical Race Theory; African American Literature; Digital Humanities; Post-Colonial Theory; American Literature; Dalit Literature; Harlem Renaissance; Cultural Studies; Afro-Futurism; Comic Studies.

Dissertation Abstract

My dissertation, “Racial Recursivity: Play, Race, and History in Contemporary Video Games,” looks at various award-winning video games published from 2008-2020 and places them in the context of neoliberal multiculturism that has arisen since the end of the Cold War to argue video games are increasingly the privileged medium for upholding neoliberal racial ideology. I offer Racial Recursivity as an interpretative framework to explain how video games function as a collective racial project lending cultural credence to the spread of US-centered neoliberal multicultural hegemony across the globe. Part of this agenda includes the consistent re-writing of American racial history to adhere to the neoliberal agenda that obscures the persistence of racial inequity. The first chapter argues Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018) is a critical satire of the Western genre that reveals how capitalist impulses will always unmake collectivism and perpetrate violence against historically marginalized groups, yet the game cannot fully divest itself of the Western’s racial legacy and reinscribes a discreet racial taxonomy indebted to American Nativism. The second chapter explores two games inspired by Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899): Far Cry 2 (2008) and Spec Ops: The Line (2012). Positioning these games within a longer lineage of Western philosophical judgments of Africa as a place Hegel claimed had “no historical part of the world,” the chapter argues both games imagine Africa as a “no place” playground for players to roam and discover their humanity, revealing the central role Africa continues to play in the construction of Western humanism. The third chapter examines three cyberpunk video games: Cyberpunk 2077 (2020), Dues Ex: Mankind Divided (2016), and Detroit: Become Human (2018). These games fetishize and fear Japan, position Haiti and the Caribbean as technologically primitive, center white subjectivity, celebrate a depoliticized multiculturalism, and malevolently support collective misrememberings of Black and Civil Rights history. The fourth chapter argues The Last of Us Part II (2020) exemplifies the tepid and toothless embrace of intersectionality that has characterized the game industry over the last decade. The game uncritically adopts intersectionality by including queer and POC supporting characters whose only role is to humanize the white women dual protagonists. The final chapter turns to a Japanese video game, Bloodborne (2015),to argue the game uses aesthetic references to Victorian gothic literature and Lovecraftian horror as a critique of the Western worlding project that relies on misogyny and racialization to uphold capitalism. Bloodborne, then, serves as a critique of racial recursivity and reveals a strategy that video games can follow to refuse American neoliberal racial ideology in and beyond games.

Peer Reviewed Publications

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  • Black Video Games as New African American Novel, Cambridge History of the African American Novel (CHAAN), Cambridge UP, 2026 (invited)

  • Dark Souls as Networked Hyperlink Text: Creating Community Through Dystopia, Electronic Book Review, Summer 2025 (forthcoming)

  • Manufacturing Consent to Whiteness in Game Studies, Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds, Summer 2025 (forthcoming)

  • Blood and Blackness in FromSoftware’s Bloodborne, Victorians and Video Games, Routledge, Spring 2025 (forthcoming).

  • Race in Early Modern Video Games, Kula, summer 2025 (forthcoming).

  • The Persistent Whiteness of English Studies, ADE Bulletin, vol. 161, September 2024.

  • Blackening the Frame: Kerry James Marshall’s Rythm Mastr, Popular Culture Review, vol. 34.2, University of Nevada Las Vegas, Summer 2023. 

  • “Aquatic Knowledge for Those Who Know”: Drexciya as Black Cultural Praxis, Bodies of Water in African American Fiction & Film, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, May 2023.

  • Literary Alibi: The Consumption of African American and Dalit Literatures, The Comparatist: Comparative Racism Special Issue, vol. 46, Oct. 2022.

  • “He must have caught a stray bullet”: Police Brutality in The Walking Dead, ASAP/J, Oct. 2021.

Co-Authored Peer Reviewed Publications

  • Dimension 20: A Critical Companion with the D20 Writing Collective, University of Iowa Press, Spring 2026 (proposal under review).

  • HBCU Writing Centers Confronting the “Canonized Corpus” in LLMs with Paola Yuli, Sabrina Bramwell, and Alexandra Omogbadegun. Writing Centers and AI: Generating Early Conversations, Spring 2025 (forthcoming).

Conference Presentations 

  • Modern Language Association, MLA 2025, Session Co-Organizer for “‘Spoiling This Wonderful Falsehood’ - Japanese Video Games and Critiques of Western Worlding,” [Jan. 2025].

  • Modern Language Association, MLA 2025, “Building Coalitions Across the University,” [Jan. 2025].

  • MultiPlay: Cyborgs and Body Augmentation: Possibilities of Identities and Technology in/of Video Games, Conference Co-Organizer and Presenter, “Cyberpunk 2077: Black Techno-Orientalism,” Oct. 2024.

  • BigBadCon, “Intersectionality and Tabletop Gaming,” Oct. 2024.

  • ALT+F4: Rebooting Community after GamerGate, “The Last of Us Part II: Intersectionality After GamerGate,” Lawrence Technological University, Sep. 2024.

  • NASSR, “Games in the Classroom,” Georgetown University, Aug. 2024.

  • Digital Pedagogy Institute 2024, “Chat-GPT Call and Response: Confronting Generative AI in the Black Studies Classroom,” Toronto Metropolitan University, Aug. 2024

  • Analog Game Studies, “Theorizing Homebrew: Homebrewing as White Geekdom and Aabria Iyengar as Counternarrative,” Jul. 2024.

  • ELO (Un)linked, “Dark Souls as Networked Hyperlinked Text / Creating Community Through Dystopia,” Jul. 2024.

  • Keystone DH 2024, “Black Ludology: Play in African American Literature,” May 2024.

  • College Language Association, CLA 2024, “Black Ludology: Play in African American Literature,” Apr. 2024.

  • The Bouchet Conference, Yale 2024, “Blood, Blackness, and Bloodborne,” Apr. 2024.

  • GESA Conference, Howard University, “Blood, Blackness, and Bloodborne,” Mar. 2024.

  • Modern Language Association, MLA 2024, Session Organizer for The Burden and Privilege of HBCU Graduate Students in the Anti-CRT era, Jan. 2024.

  • JaneCon 2023, A Court of Fey and Flowers: Challenging Hegemonic White Masculinity in Table Top Gaming, Jul. 2023 

  • 13th Annual African, African American, and Diaspora Studies Interdisciplinary Conference, James Madison University, Of One Blood and the Upside-Down Black Skyscraper, Feb. 2023.

  • Modern Language Association, MLA 2023, Defying “prospero ling. Go” in Far Cry 6, Jan. 2023.

  • 12th Annual African, African American, and Diaspora Studies Interdisciplinary Conference, James Madison University, Racialized Masculinity in Watchmen, Feb. 2022.

  • Modern Language Association, MLA 2022, Literary Alibi: Langston Hughes, Namdeo Dhasal, and the Consumption of African American and Dalit Literature, Jan. 2022.

  • Endnotes: (Sub)Merged, University of British Columbia, “There, in the old water”– Nikky Finney’s Black Hydro-Poetics, May 2021. 

  • The End Times: Approaches to the Apocalypse, CUNY Graduate Center, Police Innocence and Race in The Walking Dead Comics, Mar. 2021.

  • 11th Annual African, African American, and Diaspora Studies Interdisciplinary Conference, James Madison University, Literary Alibi: Langston Hughes, Namdeo Dhasal, and the Consumption of African American and Dalit Literature, Feb. 2021.

  • University of Alabama Languages Conference, University of Alabama, The Violence of the Colonial Gaze: Postcolonialism in “The Diamond Lens,” Feb. 2020.

  • Under Water, New York University, Submerging Ink: A Hydrocolonial Reading of American Sailor’s Tattoos, Dec. 2019.

  • University College Day, Texas Wesleyan University, Humanism Lost: John Milton and Neo-Platonism, Apr. 2017.

  • University College Day, Texas Wesleyan University, “I love myself”—Conscious Rap and Transcendentalism, Apr. 2017.

  • University College Day, Texas Wesleyan University, Oroonoko: A Flawed Hero, Apr. 2016.

  • University College Day, Texas Wesleyan University, You! Will Live Forever, Apr. 2016.

  • University College Day, Texas Wesleyan University, “Better to Reign in Hell”: Satan in Paradise Lost, Apr. 2016.

Digital Humanities Projects and Publications

  • Black Omniscient Technological Skepticism in Contemporary Black Literature and Music, Youtube, May 2023. A video essay exploring how Black writers acknowledge, critique, and respond to the growing import of emergent technologies in contemporary life. This video attempts to find an answer by surveying various moments of Black omniscient technological skepticism in contemporary Black literature and music.

  • Race in Video Games iOS Application, Apple Appstore, May 2022. A free and publicly available iOS application that introduces users to the history of racial representation in video games.

  • Westworld: A Climate Change Adaptation, Itch.io, May 2020. This free-to-play Twine game re-imagine the first seasons of the HBO science-fiction series Westworld through an ecocritical lens.

Service

  • Co-Chair of Committee on the Status of Graduate Students in the Humanities (CSGSH), 1 Jul. 2023 – 30 Jun. 2025, Modern Language Association (MLA)

  • Elected Delegate Assembly Member for Middle Atlantic Region, 8 Jan. 2024 – 10 Jan. 2027, Modern Language Association (MLA)

  • Editorial Board for Multiplay, 01 May 2024 – present

  • Member of Committee on the Status of Graduate Students in the Humanities (CSGSH), 1 Jul. 2022 – 30 Jun. 2025, Modern Language Association (MLA)

  • ACE Scholars Coach for Rising Seniors at Howard University, Sep. 2022 – May 2023, Howard University

  • Chair of Election Graduate Student Council, Aug. 2021 – May 2022, Howard Graduate School of Arts and Science

Fellowships

  • Just Julian Fellowship, $24,000 Howard University, 2024-2025

  • Frederick Douglass Scholars Fellowship, $24,000 Howard University, 2023-2024

  • Frederick Douglass Scholars Fellowship, $24,000 Howard University, 2022-2023

  • Frederick Douglass Scholars Fellowship, $20,000, Howard University, 2021-2022

Grants

  • Winterthur Research Fellowship, $2,500, Winterthur Library, September 2024

  • Open Education Publishing Institute, $4,200, City College of New York, Summer 2024

  • Hugh M. Gloster Underfunded Students and Faculty Fund, $300, College Language Association, April 2024

  • HU Doctoral Scholars Program, $5,000, Howard University, Summer 2024

  • Intro to Digital Humanities Scholars Program as part of the Black Book Interactive Project (BBIP) Scholars Program, $1,100, The University of Kansas, Spring 2023-Spring 2024

  • HU-VT Digital Humanities Residency, Travel Stipend, Virginia Tech University, Spring 2023

Honors and Awards 

  • Bouchet Graduate Honor Society Inductee, Howard University, 2024

  • Preparing Future Faculty Scholar, Howard University, 2023-24

  • Preparing Future Faculty Scholar, Howard University, 2022-23

  • Preparing Future Faculty Scholar, Howard University, 2021-22

  • GSAS Threesis Academic Challenge Selection, New York University, 2020

  • University Honors Scholar, Texas Wesleyan University, 2017

  • English Departmental Honors Scholar, Texas Wesleyan University, 2017

  • Alpha Chi for Top 1% of GPAs, Texas Wesleyan University, 2017

  • Sigma Tau Delta for Outstanding English Majors, Texas Wesleyan University, 2017

  • Award for Best Graduating English Major, Texas Wesleyan University, 2017

  • Mortar Board for Outstanding Leadership, Scholarship, and Service, Texas Wesleyan University, 2016-17

  • Tau Sigma for Top Transfer Students, Texas Wesleyan University, 2016

  • Ruth Keating Literary Award for Outstanding Study in Poetry, Texas Wesleyan University, 2016

  • Phi Theta Kappa Community College Honor Society, El Centro, 2014-15

Teaching

  • African American Literature Since 1940, Instructor, Department of English, Howard University, Spring 2024

  • American Literary Foundations Teaching Assistant, Department of English, Howard University, Fall 2022 

  • Lecture on Walt Whitman for American Literary Foundations, Department of English, Howard University, 16 Feb. 2022

  • Graduate Assistant Writing Center Tutor, Department of English, Howard University, Aug. 2021-Present

DH Tools and Technical Skills

  • Programming Languages: C# (basic), Phyton (basic)

  • DH Tools: Manifold (intermediate), Voyant (intermediate), StoryMaps (intermediate), Timeline (intermediate),

  • Game Development Engines: Unity (intermediate), GameMaker (basic), Twine (intermediate)

  • Video and Music Editing: ProTools (intermediate), Rockband (advanced), FinalCut (intermediate), Adobe Premiere (basic)

  • Website Design: Wordpress (advanced), Wix (advanced), CunyCommons (basic)

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