In Spring 2019, I got to take my first-ever sabbatical, and it really changed the shape of my year. I published less than I usually do by some measures (no journal articles for once?), but I published a lot more by others (a zine, three op-eds!). This post is a bit of accounting for myself, but also just to maybe give a summary of what a year might look like if you wonder what I do with my time.

For context: I live in a major city with my spouse and one toddler. My spouse is the kind of person who says “Yeah, of COURSE you should go to Japan for 5 weeks without us,” which is the only reason I can do what I do. Because I have tenure, I also have a level of flexibility and security that I didn’t earlier in my career.

Sabbatical beauty

For most of my sabbatical, I hung around the history department at the University of North Carolina Wilmington as a visiting scholar, which was a total delight. It bought me time to really operate differently — a new place, without my family, in a lovely rented apartment with very little of my personal junk in it. I worked in the on-campus office most days and explored Wilmington on the weekends. At night, I read on the porch and started drawing after impulse buying a sketchbook in a gift shop.

Sabbatical also afforded me some time hunkered in at the archive at the Strong, where I went through the Her Interactive papers in detail and read through dozens and dozens of issues of magazines from the mid-1990s.

(Also, the heading for this section’s a nod to my friend’s skincare company of the same name, which she started on her sabbatical a few years ago! I did not start a skincare company or anything quite that cool.)

On page and screen

On the publications front, a piece I wrote about Night Trap appeared in How to Play Video Games (New York University Press, 2019). I interviewed Alan Meades for ROMchip and reviewed the Baltimore ’68 digital project for American Quarterly. Choice: Texas was anthologized in the Buzzademia special issue of Hyperrhiz. I also wrote op-eds for Vice, Quartz, and the Washington Post:

• “Disc-Free Gaming is an Archival Nightmare: Will Corporate Control Erode Game History?,” Vice Motherboard, April 22, 2019
• “New Video Game Consoles Will Kill Future Retro Gaming Culture,” Quartz, April 24, 2019
• “Why We Scapegoat Video Games for Mass Violence, and Why It’s a Mistake,” Washington Post, August 9, 2019

Based on the fun I had talking at MAGfest and drawing in my downtime in North Carolina, I launched a Kickstarter for Save Point, a video game history zine that I’m writing and illustrating. Issue 1 came out this fall (better later than never!) and Issue 2 is going to launch in a few days.

And, one last academic writing effort that won’t go live quite yet is a special issue on feminist video game history that I edited for Feminist Media Histories. I’m very excited about that. I’ll post in full when it’s live, but I couldn’t leave it out entirely.

Life in the liminal

For 2019, I traveled quite a bit starting, most notably for a study abroad in Japan with some great students. (If you’re at Illinois Tech and want to go, the program runs again this summer!). Of course, I was in Wilmington, NC and Rochester, NY, mentioned previously. I also went to SWPACA in Albuquerque, NM; and SCMS in Seattle, WA. Because I was already in Japan this summer, I hit DiGRA and Replaying Japan, both for the first time. Another first conference was speaking at MAGfest in Washington, DC, which I absolutely loved and get to go do again real soon.

I made a quick trip to Canada and spent (literally) 24 hours in Mountain View, CA to give a talk. I gave a poster on The Spider Web at the Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science, too, but that’s just a drive across town.

For the first time in forever

I actually had a ton of firsts this year. For the first time ever, a PhD advisee of mine graduated (yay!) and got a job (double yay!), which was a hugely exciting milestone. And, another fun milestone: A documentary I was interviewed for got made! I’m in the trailer. It’s weird. Being in the trailer. Not the documentary. The documentary is not weird. It’s called Insert Coin, and it’s about Midway.

The most professionally important milestone, by far, was getting my first major grant. I applied to the National Science Foundation’s STS program and received funding for a project on the history of the games for girls movement.

And, I stepped in as a departmental rep to the faculty council this fall, where I serve on the academic affairs committee and the graduate studies committee. I landed on the latter of those because I took on the role of graduate director for our programs in Technology and Humanities, which has been a sharp learning curve but largely very satisfying. (And, if you’re thinking, “Wow, I’d love to go to that grad program!” you can still apply.)

And in summary, I am very tired

No, seriously. That’s it. That’s the punchline! I’m very tired. I’m behind on many things. I’ve got a cold about 34.7% of the time because that’s what toddlers do to you — they just bring home every ailment known to man. At least it’s not head lice (yet?). Please don’t be head lice.

I’m proud of the work I have done this year, including the service and administrative duties I’ve handled, I also know I’m behind on research in some real ways. Sabbatical was great, but it ended, and that time is responsible for almost all the research I’ve completed this year. Summer and fall both were wall-to-wall teaching and service; I try, to the best of my ability, to be home when I’m at home. It’s hard, though, when our jobs were so clearly not set up for the lives we have or the people we are.

Happy New Year! May 2020 feel fresh and unwritten.