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
Anke Mikos
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, digital media, the role of the Catholic Church in German society and politics. She is currently conducting her PhD project entitled "The German Catholic Church as a political actor - A sociological discourse analysis of knowledge regarding the positioning process of the RCC and the (potentially) associated exclusion of Church members."
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.
Jamie Fawcus
is an electroacoustic composer, sound designer, multimedia artist and performer, and is currently Senior Lecturer in Music and Sound Design in the Division of Game Development in the School of Informatics, University of Skövde (Sweden). His research and creative activities centre on the language of physical space in acousmatic music, location-specific performances and sound assembly, archaeoacoustics, links between writing/narrative and sonic art, and new forms of intellectual and emotional expression using sound within interactive media, such as video games.
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 presents 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 examines 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 several influential publications examining religion on the Internet and was one of the pioneering researchers in this developing field of study.
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. She teaches on environmental justice in literature and video games as well as environmental advocacy, ecocriticism, and narrative.
Zhange Ni
is an 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 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.
Andrew Phelps
is a professor in the Film & Media Arts Division of the School of Communication at American University (AU), and Director of the AU Game Center, a multidisciplinary effort that engages faculty, staff, and students from several divisions and departments across AU. AU offers several degrees and certificates relative to games and media, including an MA in Game Design and an MFA in Games and Interactivity, and Phelps advises students in these programs as well as other areas of media arts and computing. Students from programs Dr. Phelps has designed have enjoyed careers in the professional industry at Activision, Amazon Game Studios, Microsoft, Sony, Zynga.
Christian Schwarzenegger
is a professor of Communication and Media Studies with a focus on Media Change at the University of Bremen/ZeMKI and leads the lab "Media Change and Long-term Transformation Processes". As an expert in digital media cultures, he researches how computer games serve as spaces for communication and memory and the social functions they fulfill. Together with Karsten D. Wolf and Kerstin Radde-Antweiler, he is part of the ZeMKI research area "Digital Gaming" and its research DiGamer studio.
Vit Šisler
is an Assistant Professor of New Media at the Faculty of Arts at Charles University in Prague. His research deals with 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. 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.
Lars de Wildt
is an 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 video games make belief, and how online platforms birth conspiracy theories. For more, see larsdewildt.eu.
Karsten D. Wolf
is a professor of Media Education at the University of Bremen/ZeMKI and leads the lab "Media Education & Educational Media". As an expert in digital learning cultures, he researches how explanatory videos, social media, and digital gaming influence educational processes, with a particular focus on the design of serious games and the analysis of informal learning environments. Together with Christian Schwarzeneggersten, D. Wolf, and Kerstin Radde-Antweiler, he is part of the ZeMKI research area "Digital Gaming" and its research DiGamer studio.
Xenia Zeiler
is a 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: 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. See also: frankgbosman.nl.
Souvik Mukherjee
is an 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 narrative and 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 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 board games and colonialism.
Rachel Wagner
is an 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 published her 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.
