Saramanda Swigart is a PhD student in the Film and Digital Media Department at University of California Santa Cruz, with an MA in literature from San Francisco State University (concentration in game studies) and an MFA in creative writing and literary translation from Columbia University. From 2014-2024 she taught composition, literature electives, creative writing, and rhetoric at College of San Mateo and City College of San Francisco, where she spearheaded the English Community of Practice, an Equity-funded program to pool teaching resources, provide equity training, and improve onboarding for incoming faculty. In 2021 she collaborated on an open-source rhetoric textbook, entitled How Arguments Work, published by LibreTexts, for which she wrote, among others, a chapter on the rhetoric of images. She designed the course “Engl 62: Videogames as Literature,” offered for the first time at CCSF in the fall of 2022, and taught “Video Games, Politics, and the State” at SFSU. Her graduate work investigates videogames as relics of culture, exploring the problematics and potential of the artform as seen through various theoretical lenses.
Videogames and postcolonial theory, queer theory, feminism, affect theory, mad studies, psychoanalytic theory, and deconstruction
SFSU:
Sally Casanova Predoctoral Fellowship
English Outstanding Achievement Award
Columbia:
Summa cum laude
Meritorious scholarship
PAMLA 2024 Palm Springs, California, Nov 2024
“Translating Empire: Stealth Gameplay as Queer Reframing of Power”
SWPACA 2024 Albuquerque, New Mexico, Feb 2024 “The Explorable Psyche: Videogame Space as Metaphor for Self”
PAMLA 2023 Portland Oregon, Oct 2023 “Seeing Double: The Recursive Self and Psychological Repetition in Returnal”
RMMLA 2023 Denver Colorado, Oct 2023 “Who Has Control? A Dialogic Game Derived from the Crowdsourced Imaginary”