She trains faculty how to teach using games
As director of the Digital Literacy and Communications Lab, Courtney Rivard brings a humanistic lens to the study and teaching of games.
Why her work matters
Courtney Rivard received a $54,981 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support a yearlong curricular development and faculty training program on teaching with games. The grant will lead to the development of a critical game studies minor in the English and comparative department in the College of Arts & Sciences. The goal of the new minor is to put questions of identity, inclusion and representation at the center of game analysis and design.
Rivard’s interdisciplinary research brings together rhetoric, archives and information and feminist studies. Her first book, “Layered Lives: Rhetoric and Representation in the Southern Life History Project” (2022, Stanford University Press), demonstrates how gender and race informed the writing practices used to create the concept of “life histories,” which documented the lives of Southerners struggling to survive the Great Depression.
What people say about her
“Courtney is an extraordinary leader and mentor who goes above and beyond in everything she does. In creating and running the Digital Literacy and Communications Lab, she and her talented team produce all of our department’s social media and support our pedagogical mission. In essence, Courtney helps the department tell its stories — stories about how our work as humanists effects positive change in the world. Her amazing Gaming Initiative has deservedly been recognized by an NEH grant for curriculum. In short, she inspires us all to innovate not only how we teach the humanities but also how we think as humanists.”
— Mary Floyd-Wilson, Mann Distinguished Professor and chair, English and comparative literature department
Who she is
Rivard earned a bachelor’s degree in political science from Emory University and a doctorate in politics and feminist studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz. At Carolina, she is a teaching associate professor in English and comparative literature and director of the department’s Digital Literacy and Communications Lab. She launched the DLC’s Gaming Initiative, culminating in Carolina’s first game-based classroom, which opened in Greenlaw Hall in 2019. Rivard was a Tyson/Belk Fellow in spring 2021 and received a 2022 Schwab Academic Excellence Award through the Institute for the Arts and Humanities.
Adapted from a story by Kristen Chavez, Institute for the Arts & Humanities.Read the entire story here.
