By Director Anne Basting In early September, Professor Jennifer Johung (C21’s Lead Faculty Advisor) and I met up on the 9th floor of Curtin to get the lay of the land at C21. It was quite a trip.  Much of it hadn’t changed since I was first here in 1995.  Then, over...

Artist Dick Blau got a dog. Out of his walks, he got to know the street, to see the traces of those who had passed through, to meditate its random, often mysterious beauty, and to witness the moments of its pathos.

By Allain Daigle and Krista Grensavitch For the last two years, C21 Graduate Fellow Allain Daigle and C21 Tennessen Scholar Krista Grensavitch have been collaborating on short videos that explore feminist teaching practices. Krista is a PhD candidate in History; Allain is a PhD candidate in English. Together, we’ve worked...

By Laya Liebeseller (PhD student in Anthropology at UW-Milwaukee and a Graduate Fellow at the Center for 21st Century Studies) I study play communities, those communities that form in the playing of games. Most of my work focuses on role-playing games (RPGs). I wrote my master’s thesis on live-action role-play,...

By Matthew Boman Who cares about ongoing violence in Syria? Apparently, The Onion, for one. Recently they ran a piece titled “The 6 Best Dresses At The Golden Globes” where, under pictures of the civil war going on in Syria, are captions mimicking the banal commentary of fashion magazines and...

By Patrick Jagoda My remarks at the “Dark Side of the Digital Humanities” MLA roundtable (January 4, 2013) represent some preliminary thoughts and questions about games that I explore in much greater detail in a forthcoming essay (“Gamification and Other Forms of Play”) that will appear in boundary 2 in...

By Michael Z. Newman A colleague who studies the history of media and popular culture was excited and a bit astonished recently to discover than an excellent book addressing a main topic of her research had been published in the 1990s. She wished she had read it while working on...

By Rachael Sullivan Around C21, excitement has been building for the SLSA (Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts) Conference coming up September 27-30. The buzz isn’t just about the location—right here in Milwaukee!—or the fact that C21 Director Richard Grusin has had a key role in coordinating the conference....

By Heather Warren-Crow Let’s begin numerically. Right after 9.11.01, envelopes containing Bacillus anthracis were mailed to 2 US senators, a news anchor, the editor of the New York Post, and the headquarters of the publisher of Playboy and The National Enquirer.  At least 22 people contracted anthrax.  5 died.  According to...

By Charlotte Frost Within the busy The Nonhuman Turn conference Twitter stream (which was marked by the #c21nonhuman hashtag) there loomed a rather apt entity: a distinctively nonhuman interlocutor by the name of Richard Gruesome. This zombie-esque character, apparently inspired by C21 director Richard Grusin (they both wear the same...