I am fascinated with storytelling and popular culture, and most of my work explores the ways in which a media form changes the experience of stories they mediate. 

I enjoy teaching, and was previously employed in the Film, Television and Media Studies Department at the University of Auckland between 2005 and 2013.  I've been teaching in the School of English and Media Studies at Massey University since July of 2014.

I received my PhD from the University of Auckland in 2012 on the subject of comparative storytelling in digital media.  I have published articles considering how the modes of engagement involved in playing games and watching films distinguish the experience of the stories they mediate (GameStudies.org, 2012), argued that the community surrounding the television series My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is structurally and affectively analogous to an Alternate Reality Game (Transformative Works and Culture, 2013) and that videogames allow for the affectively unmediated experience of moral dilemmas because of the sense of responsibility felt by the player (The Projected and the Prophetic, 2001, edited by Jordan J. Copeland).  An article exploring how that sense of responsibility in videogames functions and the effect it has on the experience of play in greater depth was published in a special issue of Transactions of the Digital Games Research Association (ToDiGRA 2015).  I was invited to submit an article arguing that the videogame Gone Home uses techniques from museum installations and heritage studies to encourage politically-powerful empathy for a special issue of the International Journal of Heritage Studies (IJHS August 2017). 

An article arguing that the web-serial Homestuck is extending transmedia storytelling by folding the audience's familiarity with different ways of engaging with media into the story itself was published in Convergence in 2017.

Currently I'm working on one article that argues narratively-complex television is being created for younger audiences, exploring television shows such as Gravity Falls, Steven Universe, Star vs. The Forces of Evil and Adventure Time, and a second article exploring the dynamics surrounding online 'hatemobs' such as Gamergate.

Pronouns: "He/Him.".