Like many of our colleagues, I suspect, I was right in the middle of a few projects when the pandemic walls started closing in. I flew home from a research trip to New York City in March 2020 amidst dire reports of Covid-19 outbreaks there. Yikes. A short time later, an editor in London informed me that the essay collection in which my work was to appear would be the last project off to the printer before activity was suspended. Those first anxious pandemic months found me trying to muster the concentration to finish the aforementioned pieces while making the clumsy transition to remote teaching, sort-of homeschooling, a bit of elder care, and sundry disruptions. The rest is a blur, but here I am: safe, relieved, hopeful.
This volume from Peter Lang/Oxford features essays on transmedia storytelling mostly as it plays out in entertainment media. My contribution is the outlier: an essay on transmedia teaching that profiles the work of New York Institute of Technology Professor John Misak.
I’ll thank Ann DeMarle for inspiring this essay on collaboration in the Journal of Media Education (at left), which may make a second appearance in a forthcoming book that she and other veterans of the Breakaway electronic game design team are developing. (Full text is available by clicking on the cover image.)
I’ve published a few pieces in the Critical Insights (Salem Press) volumes over the past few years. My most recent piece, which came out in early 2020, focuses on conspiracy terrorism in the James Bond films featuring the transnational crime organization S.P.E.C.T.R.E.