Mary Flanagan

Mary Flanagan examines how people create and use technology. Her groundbreaking explorations across the arts, humanities, and sciences represent a novel use of methods and tools that bind research with introspective cultural production. As an artist, her more than twenty major works range from game-inspired systems to computer viruses, embodied interfaces to interactive texts. These works have been exhibited internationally at venues including the Laboral Art Center, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Banff Centre, Ars Electronica, Artist’s Space, the Guggenheim Museum New York, and other venues in Brazil, France, UK, Canada, Taiwan, New Zealand, and Australia.

As a researcher, she focuses on popular culture, digital studies, and computer games to look at issues of representation, behavior, equity, and process. Her books in English include reload: rethinking women + cyberculture (2002), re:SKIN (2007), and Critical Play: Radical Game Design (2009). In the field of creative writing, Flanagan is known as a writer of electronic literature, and she is also a poet, with work in The Iowa Review, Barrow Street, Saranac Review, Mudfish, and other books & periodicals.

Flanagan founded the Tiltfactor game research laboratory in 2003, where researchers study and make social games, urban games, and software in a rigorous theory/practice environment. She is the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor in Digital Humanities at Dartmouth College.