Here’s what you need to know about me: I love a good yarn; I love a good debate; I love connection. My first love brought me to comparative literary studies, and I earned a master’s in English literature and a PhD in comparative literature, specializing in the literature of the Americas (15th to 19th century). Those pursuits led me to teaching, which allowed me not only to hone my teaching and mentoring skills but also to debate for a living through the Socratic method.

It turns out, though, that undergraduates do not enjoy debating with their teachers (is it the grades?).

My experiences in teaching, mentoring, and (now) academic advising helped me discover that I hunger for connection–and that, perhaps more than ever, human connection is mediated by and through technology. And so I find myself engaged in a new academic but also deeply research agenda animated by these two questions: 1) how can the interdisciplinary study of television and video games right now help us understand our socially constructed reality? And, 2) how do our engagements with stories–and with each other through stories–help us explore our responsibility to each other as what the early Marx called fellow species beings?

I am interested in pursuing these questions rigorously, theoretically. But, even though I am in a formal academic program, Georgetown University’s Master’s in Communication, Culture, and Technology, I want to engage in a continuing, iterative conversation with those within the academy as well as those outside it. As an immigrant to this country, I have learned to be a translator and a conduit between people and communities. My life experiences, I believe, have given me the skills to engage in dialogue with different communities (i.e., academic and non-academic as well as across cultures and social identities) and also to mediate between different communities. My goal is to be in professional, academic, and cultural roles where I get to learn how we know what we know through stories, learn how to better debate for the purposes of mutual understanding and of achieving common goals, and, thus, learn not only what it means to be responsible for each other but also how to live up to that responsibility.