Heidi Coleman is a director, dramaturg, and game designer. She has positioned herself at the intersection of games and performance and serves as a co-director of The Fourcast Lab, a transmedia design collective based at the University of Chicago, which creates Alternate Reality Games (ARGs), pervasive games, cross-platform stories, and networked performances. Coleman is a Senior Instructional Professor for Theater and Performance Studies at the University of Chicago.
Patrick Jagoda’s research focuses on media theory, game studies and design, science studies, and 20th- and 21st-century American literature and culture. He designs transmedia, digital and analog games, including the climate change alternate reality game “Terrarium” (2019), which received the 2020 IndieCade award for the best Location Based and Live Play Design.
Miguel Martínez's research and teaching focus on the cultural and literary histories of early modern Spain, colonial Latin America, and the Philippines. He is the author of Front Lines. Soldiers’ Writing in the Early Modern Hispanic World ( 2016; trans. Las líneas del frente, 2024), Comuneros.
Katherine Buse’s research focuses on digital media, technoscience, science fiction, and the environment. Her book in progress, “Speculative Planetology: Science, Culture and the Building of Model Worlds,” discusses how the world building of popular science fiction media is related to the work of planetary and climate scientists. She also uses video game design and criticism to think about questions of science, technology, and the environment. Buse considers how can game design help imagine better environmental futures.
Candace Vogler's research focuses on moral philosophy, with special interest in metaphysics, moral psychology, and the foundations of the ethical.
James Osborne is an archaeologist who works in the eastern Mediterranean and ancient Middle East during the Bronze and Iron Ages (ca. 3500‒500 BCE). He focuses especially on Anatolia, a region that is today within the Republic of Turkey, during the late second and early first millennium BCE. Most of his publications have concentrated on the intersection of space and power, using analysis of Anatolian monumental buildings, cities, and settlement patterns during the Iron Age as his primary subject matter.
Since the 1990s, Jason Salavon's practice has explored the dynamic relationship between computational technology and visual culture. His work spans both data-driven art, transforming vast cultural datasets into compelling visual forms, and generative art, using custom algorithms to create original imagery. His pieces, held in collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, uncover hidden patterns in popular culture and human behavior.
Steven Rings is a music theorist whose research focuses on popular music, voice, and transformational theory. Rings’s second book, What Did You Hear?: The Music of Bob Dylan (University of Chicago Press, 2025), explores the virtues of imperfection in Bob Dylan’s music making.
While the University of Chicago is colloquially known as “the place where fun comes to die,” ironically, its faculty, programs, and students routinely push boundaries in the fields of gaming and often prove UChicago is “the place where fun comes to play.” The study of video games is a young, exciting, and growing field, and the UChicago Library is actively developing a video game collection to support video game studies and research on campus. Join us for a hands-on game session and learn more about UChicago Library’s growing game collection.
The University of Chicago teaches more than 50 languages each year, many of which are less commonly taught languages. Join us in the Chicago Language Center to learn more about these diverse languages and experience what it is like to learn some of them. During this session, you will be able to experience 15-minute mini-courses about the following languages: Catalan, Portuguese, Basque, Turkish, Persian, Norwegian, Yiddish, and Ukrainian. Attendees become not just less commonly taught language learners, but also gain an introduction to their historical, academic, and global importance.
