bio

 

I am Associate Professor of English at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand, and Head of Programme for English and Linguistics.

I frame narrative fiction as a valuable mode of inquiry into the workings of cognition, and draw on cognitive science and philosophy of mind to establish how fictional minds help explain actual ones. My teaching and research on digital fiction and literary games offers hope for the future of the literary imagination in a digital culture. I’ve authored Reading Network Fiction (2007), a book on pre-Web and Web-based digital fiction, and Refiguring Minds in Narrative Media (2015), which is focused on cognitive approaches to narrative and literary theory in print novels, digital narratives, and story-driven videogames. Some of my other work appears in Narrative, Poetics Today, Digital Humanities Quarterly, Games and Culture and, most recently, an article on “How to Play a Parable” in Storyworlds: a Journal of Narrative Studies. I am also the creator of dtour, a literary tourism app developed in partnership with the Dunedin UNESCO City of Literature, available free from the App Store and Google Play.