Scott Nelson is a Ph.D. student at The University of Texas at Austin. His research examines the ecologies of intellectual property in independent and amateur multimedia production, with a focus on video games. Currently, Scott is a visual media specialist at the Digital Writing & Research Lab, where he has served as an assistant director in the past. He led the development of Battle Lines in its first year, and was the instructor of record for the Writing in Digital Environments course where the game was implemented. In his spare time, he makes art rock posters for shows that have never happened.
Chris Ortiz y Prentice, a Ph.D. student in English at The University of Texas at Austin, was a part of every step of the development of Battle Lines. He was a member of the team that dreamt up the game in 2010–2011, and he headed up the group that implemented Battle Lines in 2011–2012. He knows the ARG’s every nook and cranny and holds in his heart a special place for it and its designers. He has written an article about the video game Mass Effect, and his dissertation investigates the function of games in the Edwardian imaginations of Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling, and H.G. Wells.
M. Catherine Coleman is a 2012–2013 Powers Fellow in the Department of English at The University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on benevolence and voluntarism in colonial North America and the early United States and the digital humanities.
Eric Detweiler is a Ph.D. student specializing in rhetoric at The University of Texas at Austin. His interests include writing pedagogy, rhetorical theory, multimodal composition, ethics, and various intersections between those things. He also helps produce Zeugma, a podcast on rhetoric and technology.
Marjorie Foley is a Ph.D. student researching the relationship between individual and collective identity in movements like Anonymous, Occupy, and the tea parties. Her work engages questions of populism, protest, racism, and the so-called “post–postmodernisms.” She currently serves as an assistant director in the Digital Writing & Research Lab at The University of Texas at Austin.
Kendall Gerdes is a Ph.D. student in rhetoric at The University of Texas at Austin, where she received her MA in 2011. She teaches in the Department of Rhetoric & Writing, and she is a project leader in the Digital Writing & Research Lab. She is also a Governing Board member for the Rhetoric Society of America. Her work spans ancient rhetorics and rhetorical theory, deconstruction, and queer theory.
Cleve Wiese is a Ph.D. Candidate in the English Department at The University of Texas at Austin with an emphasis on rhetoric and composition. He is particularly interested in applications of ancient rhetorical theory and pedagogy to modern writing classes, and his dissertation project focuses on Roman Declamation and what this historically distant institution can teach contemporary rhetoric teachers about their own discipline and practice. He holds a master's degree in journalism from New York University and a bachelor's degree from Rhodes College in Memphis. Before returning to graduate school, he worked as a production editor for an arts journal in Brooklyn and as cops and courts reporter for a daily newspaper in rural Virginia. Before that, he was a bike messenger.
R. Scott Garbacz is a doctoral candidate at The University of Texas. His dissertation deals with the influence of a fictional medieval debate between a Jewish girl named Truth and a Greek boy named Falsehood, charting the cognitive strategies it models across medieval French and English literature.
Matt King is an assistant professor of rhetoric, writing, and literature at St. Bonaventure University. His teaching and research interests focus on rhetorical theories of identification, procedural, digital, and nonrational rhetorics, writing and composition studies, 20th-century American and postmodern literature, and video games. He received his Ph.D. from The University of Texas at Austin in August 2012.