Board
EDITORS-IN-CHIEF
Kerstin Radde-Antweiler
is professor of Religious Studies at the University of Bremen, Germany. Her research focuses on mediatized religion, mediatization theory, video gaming, Christian traditions and ritual studies. She authored several articles and co-edited several volumes and special journal issues, including Journalism, Media and Religion: How News Media Ascribe Meanings to the Terms “Sacred”, “Secular” and “Authority” (JRMDC 2018), Handbook of Journalism and Religion (Routledge 2020), Mediatized Religion in Asia (Routledge 2019), and Methods for Researching Video Games and Religion (Routledge 2018). She is founding member of the International Academy for the Study of Videogaming and Religion (lASGAR).
Lissa Holloway-Attaway
is an Associate Professor in Media Arts, Aesthetics, and Narration in the Division of Game Development within the School of Informatics at the University of Skövde (Sweden). She is the leader for the Media, Technology and Culture research group, and she teaches in the games education. Her background is in theatre performance, literature studies, and digital culture/media studies, and she works across many digital media forms, from digital art, to electronic literature, experimental audio/video, and games. Her creative and critical work has been published, exhibited and performed in a number of international venues. Her current research is focused on emergent media (AR/VR/MR), experimental narrative, digital cultural heritage games, and environmental posthumanities.
MANAGING EDITOR
Dom Ford
is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Religious Studies and Related Didactics at the University of Bremen and a member of the ZeMKI Media and Religion lab. He received his PhD from the IT University of Copenhagen in 2022 for the dissertation Mytholudics: Understanding Games As/Through Myth, in which he proposed a method for analysing games through a framework of myth. His postdoctoral project focuses on the negotiation between players, game developers and the games themselves in the formation of a community surrounding a game, seen through a framework of communual mythmaking. His research interests also include spatiality, monsters, nostalgia, and the respresentation of history in games.
SOCIAL MEDIA DIRECTOR
Samira Ghozzi-Ben Miled
is a research assistant and doctoral candidate at the Institute for the Study of Religion and Related Didactics at the University of Bremen. Her primary research interests are religion, mental health, and digital media, in particular social media. She is currently conducting her PhD project entitled “The construction of mental health among muslim actors on Instagram - a comparative study between german and tunisian speaking influencers“.
BOARD
John W. Borchert
is a Lecturer in the Religious Studies Department at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro having received his PhD from Syracuse University in 2021. He is interested in how religious practices and media technologies intersect across American religious histories, particularly their impact on embodiment and death. He teaches on American religion, embodiment, death, Christianities, and religion and media/technology. John is Co-Chair of the Religion and Media Workshop of the American Academy of Religion and you can follow him on Twitter @JohnWBorchert.
Owen Gottlieb
is an Associate Professor of Interactive Games and Media at the School of Interactive Games and Media at the Rochester Institute of Technology. He is the Founder and Director of the Interactive, Media, and Learning Lab at RIT. His research traverses interactive media for learning and heritage, narrative design, instructional media history, and interactive media for healing and wellness. His and his team’s learning games have been featured at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, IndieCade, Meaningful Play, Boston FIG, and Now Play This London.
Gregory Price Grieve
is a Professor at the University of North Carolina Greensboro. He researches and teaches at the intersection of Asian religions, media, and theory. Specifically, he is a leader in the field of digital religion, and a pioneer in the emerging field of religion in digital games. He publishes books and articles and present internationally on these subjects.
Christopher Helland
completed his doctorate examining early forms of online religious activity. He was heavily influenced by the writings of William Gibson and Neal Stephenson and has been an avid gamer (both online and offline) since his teenage years. His current research is examining the transfer of the sacred into cyberspace. In particular he is exploring the wiring of sacred pilgrimage sites and online ritual activities. He is also working closely with diaspora religious groups as they develop internet technology to help maintain their religious identities. He has a number of influential publications examining religion on the Internet and was one of the pioneering researchers in this developing field of study.
Lisa Kienzl
is a researcher in the area of media, religion and culture at the Institute of Religious Studies and Related Didactics at the University of Bremen. She is a member in the lab media and religion at the Centre for Media, Communication and Information Research (ZeMKI) and part of the interdisciplinary and collaborative research platform Worlds of Contradiction (WoC). She holds a PhD in Cultural Anthropology and in Religious Studies. Her research interests include religion and identity formations in digital media, visual material culture in contemporary and historic settings, qualitative methods, such as digital anthropology, and the transformations of religion, gender as well as the notion of the nation in popular and gaming cultures.
Zhange Ni
is associate professor in the Department of Religion and Culture at Virginia Tech, USA. She holds a Ph.D. in Religion and Literature from the University of Chicago Divinity School. Her research is focused on the intersection of religion and popular culture in North America and East Asia. She has published The Pagan Writes Back: When World Religions Meets World Literature (2015), Religion and the Arts in the Hunger Games (2020), and articles on internet-based genre fiction, digital gaming, and fan cultures in both English and Chinese. She also teaches courses on Asian religions, religion and media, religion and technoscience.
Vit Šisler
is an Assistant Professor of New Media at the Faculty of Arts at Charles University in Prague. His research deals with the information and communication technology in the Middle East and educational and political video games. He has published extensively in issues related to ICT, the Middle East and video games and his work has appeared in New Media & Society; Communication Yearbook; Information, Communication & Society and the Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication. He is also a co-founder of Charles Games, an indie game studio pushing the boundaries of narrative and serious games. He was a lead game designer of the award-winning video games Attentat 1942 and Svoboda 1945: Liberation.
Gia Coturri Sorenson
is an instructor in the English Department at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and the Assistant Director of the University Writing Center. She earned her PhD in nineteenth century British and American literature and environmental humanities from UNCG in 2020. Her dissertation examined how Romantic era historical fiction authors personify trees to encourage environmentalism. She teaches on environmental justice in literature and videogames as well as environmental advocacy, ecocriticism, and narrative. She serves as the English Department’s Videogame Studies liaison, helping develop new classes and train instructors, and advises undergraduate and graduate students working on interdisciplinary environmental projects.
Kathrin Trattner
is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for the Study of Religion and Related Didactics at the University of Bremen. Her primary research interests are religion, culture, and digital media, in particular video gaming. She is currently conducting a research project entitled “Gaming the Nation: An Intersectional Investigation of Nation, Identity, and Video Gaming”, funded by the University of Bremen’s Central Research Development Fund.
Lars de Wildt
is assistant professor in media and cultural industries at the Centre for Media and Journalism Studies, University of Groningen. He studies how media cultures and industries change contemporary worldviews; including how videogames make belief, and how online platforms birth conspiracy theories. His first book, The Pop Theology of Videogames: Producing and Playing with Religion was published open access with Amsterdam University Press. For more, see larsdewildt.eu.
Xenia Zeiler
is professor of South Asian Studies at the University of Helsinki. Her research and teaching are situated at the intersection of digital media, culture, and society, specifically as related to India and global Indian communities. Her focus within this wider field of digital culture is video games and gaming research, in India and beyond. Closely related to and supporting this are her other major research areas: In order to understand how digital spaces such as social media or video games, and more traditional media formats such as film or TV, shape and are shaped by various actors, she researches and teaches digital religion, popular culture, cultural heritage, and mediatization processes. For more, see https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/en/persons/xenia-zeiler.
ADVISORY BOARD
Stef Aupers
is a cultural sociologist and professor of ‘media culture’ at the Institute for Media Studies, University of Leuven. He published widely on religion, spirituality, magic and conspiracy theories in modern ‘secular’ society and, particularly, on the affinity between religion and ICT. He was co-applicant and postdoc researcher in the NWO project ‘Cyberspace Salvations: Computer Technology, Simulation and Modern Gnosis’ (2003-2007; with Peter Pels, Leiden University, and Dick Houtman, Erasmus University Rotterdam).
Frank G. Bosman
is a senior researcher and Academic Director of the Master Christianity and Society at the Tilburg school of Catholic Theology (the Netherlands). He is an expert on cultural Theology, especially religion and digital games. He published Gaming and the Divine. A New Systematic Theology of Video Games (Routledge 2019) and Gaming as Art. A Communication-Oriented Perspective on the Relationship Between Gaming and Art, together with Archibald van Wieringen (De Gruyter 2023). See also: frankgbosman.nl.
Souvik Mukherjee
is assistant professor in Cultural Studies at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. A pioneering scholar of games studies from South Asia, he focuses on focusing on the narrative and the literary through the emerging discourse of videogames as storytelling media, particularly through the lens of Postcolonialism and Subaltern Studies. He is the author of Videogames and Storytelling: Reading Games and Playing Books (Palgrave Macmillan 2015), Videogames and Postcolonialism: The Empire Plays Back (Springer 2017) and Videogames in the Indian Subcontinent: Development, Cultures and Representations (Bloomsbury Academic 2022). He is currently working on a monograph on Indian boardgames and colonialism.
Rachel Wagner
is Associate Professor of Religion at Ithaca College. She has published numerous articles and chapters on the intersection between religion and media, especially religion and film, and religion and gaming. Her first book, Godwired: Religion, Ritual and Virtual Reality (Routledge, 2012) explores the theoretical intersection between religion and video games. She is currently working on a second book called God, Games, and Guns, which considers the transformation of apocalypticism in contemporary visual media and video games.
Michael Waltemathe
is Akademischer Oberrat (Senior Lecturer) at the Department of Protestant Theology at Ruhr-University Bochum in Germany. He researches and teaches at the intersection of theology, religious education and media studies. For several years he has been working in the area of computer games and religion, especially in the use of computer games in religious education. His theoretical interests include constructivist reflections on religious education and the opportunities to learn in and from religious plurality by incorporating New Media.
