About

I’m an Associate Professor of English at the University of Southern Mississippi. I specialize in American literature, media history, book history, comparative media studies, game studies, and digital humanities. My work examines how different texts and technologies shape perception and influence how we read, write, learn, see, play, think, and make sense of the world. I have published articles on play theory, gaming literacy, fan theories and video game interpretation, comics and perception, telegraphy and yellow journalism, games and ecocriticism, authorship and archival memory, and a range of nineteenth-century writers and writing technologies. 

One of my current book projects, Gaming Perception: The Aesthetic Education of Video Games, examines how video games are a neglected site for tracing transformations in reading, writing, and interpretation over the past two decades. Informed by literary and game studies, the book argues that independent video games reconfigure core humanities practices such as reading, writing, seeing, and feeling, delineating new forms of perception that constitute their own literary and aesthetic education. The project expands on published and forthcoming articles in which I examine indie games and the literary metagames they inspire.

I also write about American literature, media history, and digital media theory. My scholarship has appeared in journals such as Pedagogy, American Literature, American Literary History, American Literary Realism, and Arizona Quarterly, among others. My second book project, Authorial Intelligence: Writers and Writing Machines in the Age of Edison, investigates American literary realism from a technological and media historical perspective. Drawing on extensive archival research, the book challenges our traditional understanding of authorship and literary history through detailed close readings of archival media, technologies of writing and inscription, and what German media theorists refer to as cultural techniques.

At USM, I teach graduate and undergraduate courses in game studies, interactive fiction, book history, archival research, digital humanities, and American literature. I also serve as faculty advisor of USM Game Studies, managing editor of its student journal Quest Log, curator of student games on itch.io, and an affiliate member of the Center for Digital Humanities. This website includes my course descriptions, sample lectures slides, and information about my work. Feel free to contact me at craig.carey@usm.edu or follow me on twitter at @ccareylit.