Mike Sell

Professor

Office: 506-AA Leonard Hall
Email: msell@iup.edu
Blog: This Professor Plays: Exploring the Interface Between Games and Literature
Twitter: @mike_sell

Education

PhD, University of Michigan, English Language and Literature, 1997

AB, Duke University, English, 1990

Academic Interests

• Playful literatures: I'm interested in the way videogames, board games, and tabletop roleplaying games tell stories. And I’m fascinated by novels, movies, and poems that utilize playful writing strategies or that tell stories about games and those who play them.
• The Digital Storytelling Project: We provide consultation, bespoke curricula, and on-site, hands-on support to public school teachers, university educators, and non-profit organizations to incorporate digital storytelling, design thinking, and decision education into their curricula
• Speculative literatures: Horror, science-fiction, and other narratives that challenge what is and imagines what might be.
• Black American literature, art, and culture with a focus on the 1950s to the present.
• Critical theory, with emphasis on power, identity, and the ethics of literary study.
• Critical pedagogy. I practice a pedagogy of radical honesty and transparency.

Publications

My latest book is Ready Reader One: The Stories We Tell With, About, and Around Videogames (Louisiana State University Press, 2024), edited with Megan A. Condis. We’ve collected essays about the many kinds of narratives surrounding videogames, including adaptations of Alice in Wonderland, novelizations of videogames, life writing, fan fiction, participatory culture, and collaborative storyworld creation. It is the first book of its kind, underlining how important it is for us to know how we think and feel and experience this increasingly ubiquitous and powerful medium. “Where,” we ask, “is the literature in games literacy?”

In Systemic Dramaturgy: A Handbook for the Digital Age (Southern Illinois University Press, 2022). My co-author, Michael M. Chemers, and I describe an approach to theater that challenges conventional understandings of technology, reframing both our understandings of theatre history and extending the skills of theatre-making to other performance forms such as tabletop roleplaying games and videogames. As one of our readers remarks, we “celebrate the transferable skills of dramaturgy as well as its vital role in building empathy among spectators and consumers of digital media.”

In addition to writing about games, I also play and design them. I'm a regular game manager of tabletop roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons, Call of Cthulhu, and Monster of the Week. And I've written several original scenarios and supplements for them, designing them for fun and to promote consciousness of race, gender, sexuality, and ability. I’m currently co-editing a D&D campaign set in Tudor-era England and developing a game about avant-garde culture in the 1910s and 20s.

I'm an internationally recognized scholar of the avant-garde, Black American literature and culture, and modern world drama, theater, and performance. My book Avant-Garde Performance and the Limits of Criticism (University of Michigan 2005) inaugurated the Critical Vanguard Studies movement. The Avant-Garde: Race Religion War (University of Chicago 2011) is the definitive genealogy of the avant-garde concept, situating it in an interdisciplinary context that understands cultural radicalism and minoritarian identity in terms of racial ideology, religious belief, and violence. I'm the editor of Avant-Garde Performance and Material Exchange (Palgrave Macmillan 2011) and Ed Bullins: Twelve Plays and Selected Writings (University of Michigan 2006). My essays have appeared in African American Review, modernism/modernity, New Literary History, TDR, Theatre Journal, and Theatre Survey as well as in anthologies published by Blackwell, Cambridge University, Oxford University, Palgrave Macmillan, Southern Illinois University Press, and the University of Michigan.

I'm as passionate about teaching as I am scholarship. Since joining IUP in 1999, I've won three Outstanding Professor of the Year and two Outstanding Adviser of the Year awards from the IUP Sigma Tau Delta organization and the Mentor of the Year award from the English Graduate Organization. I practice a pedagogy of radical honesty and methodological transparency.

Academic Interests

• Playful literature: I'm interested in interdisciplinary approaches to videogames, board games, and tabletop roleplaying games. I'm fascinated by how games and players tell stories and communicate and complicate values. I'm intrigued by literature that utilizes playful writing strategies or that tell stories about games and those who play them.
• Digital storytelling and design thinking: I'm the founder and leader of the Digital Storygame Project, which provides on-site, hands-on support to Pennsylvania public school teachers to incorporate coding and digital game design into their English Language Arts curricula.
• Black American literature, art, and culture, with focus on work created from the 1960s to the present.
• Literature, art, and culture that challenges convention and positions itself against the mainstream.
• Modern world drama, theater, and performance.
• Critical theory, with focus on power, identity, and ethics.
• Critical pedagogy.