Judd Ruggill

Judd Ruggill joined the University of Arizona in 2016 as part of the Computational Media Cluster initiative. He is an Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Public and Applied Humanities and an affiliate faculty member of Africana Studies, the Department of English, the College of Information Science, the School of Theatre, Film & Television, and the Graduate Interdisciplinary Program in Social, Cultural, and Critical Theory.  From 2008-2016, he was a faculty member in the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Arizona State University and a member of the graduate faculty of the Department of English, the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication, the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, and the New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences. He holds a PhD in Comparative Cultural and Literary Studies from the University of Arizona (2005), and co-directs the Learning Games Initiative, a transdisciplinary, inter-institutional research group he co-founded in 1999 to study, teach with, build, and archive computer games.

Dr. Ruggill's research and teaching interests center on mass media history, theory, and business, with a particular emphasis on computer game technologies, play, and cultures.  His essays have appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies, and his books include Inside the Video Game Industry: Game Developers Talk About the Business of Play (Routledge, 2017), Tempest: Geometries of Play (U. of Michigan, 2015), AZ 100 Indie Film: A State of Arizona Centennial Celebration (Confluencenter/AZMAC, 2012), Gaming Matters: Art, Science, Magic, and the Computer Game Medium (U. of Alabama, 2011), The Computer Culture Reader (CSP, 2009), and Fluency in Play: Computer Game Design for Less Commonly Taught Language Pedagogy (CERCLL, 2008).