The following is a list of University of Chicago faculty whose work has incorporated games, sports, or play as topics of research, teaching, creative practice, campus events, or public-facing projects. The Year of Games aims to foster collaboration between University of Chicago researchers and instructors from a wide array of perspectives.

Bill Brown (Professor, Department of English Language and Literature)
Research: Marxism; cinema studies; history of literary criticism; literature and the arts; the novel; urban studies; visual culture and iconography; popular literary genres; recreational forms (baseball, kung fu), and mass-cultural phenomena (from roller coasters to Kodak cameras)

Jodi Byrd (Professor, Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity)
Research: indigenous studies; indigenous feminist and queer studies; video game studies

Katherine Buse (Assistant Professor, Department of Cinema and Media Studies)
Research and practice: science and technology studies; science fiction studies; the environmental humanities; video game studies and design

Chris Carloy (Assistant Instructional Professor, Master of Arts Program in the Humanities and Department of Cinema and Media Studies)
Research: videogame history; theories of space and place; genre history and theory; reception studies and discourse analysis; embodied experiences of play; games and the other arts; videogame pedagogy

Heidi Coleman (Senior Instructional Professor, Committee on Theater and Performance Studies and Fourcast Lab)
Research and practice: dramaturgy; game design including alternate reality games (ARGs), pervasive games, cross-platform stories, and networked performances

Marshall Cunningham (Assistant Instructional Professor, Divinity School)
Research: Bible and the Ancient Near East
Relevant teaching: RLST 27900. Gaming the Gods: Video Games and Religion

Lorraine Daston (Visiting Professor, Committee on Social Thought and History)
Research: history of rationality, wonder, objectivity, observation, the moral authority of nature, probability theory, Cold War rationality, and scientific modernity
Author of Rules: A Short History of What We Live By

Alireza Doostdar (Associate Professor, Divinity School)
Research: Islamic studies and the anthropology of religion
Co-creator and co-host of Gaming Islam

Marc Downie (Associate Professor of Practice; Department of Cinema and Media Studies)
Research and Practice: digital art, non-photorealistic computational imagery, incorporation of body movement by motion-capture and other means; artificial intelligence

Patrick Fiorilli (Lecturer, Media Arts and Design)
Research: video games and language

Clint Froehlich (Lecturer, Department of Cinema and Media Studies)
Research: Hollywood & American cinema; film history & historiography; audio-visual style in cinema; video games; genre; film exhibition; queer cinema

Ghenwa Hayek (Associate Professor, Department of Middle Eastern Studies)
Research: modern Arabic literature; literary and cultural production; space and place; identity formation in the modern Arab Middle East
Co-creator and co-host of Gaming Islam

Patrick Jagoda (Professor, Department of Cinema and Media Studies, English Language and Literature, the College, and the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology)
Research: new media; post-1945 American fiction and culture; videogames; network films; virtual worlds; transmedia storytelling; long-form American serial television; history of communication networks

Ian Bryce Jones (Lecturer, Department of Cinema and Media Studies)
Research: new media, cinema, and the arts; videogame studies

Hakan Karateke (Professor, Department of Middle Eastern Studies)
Research: Islamic History and Civilization, Islamic Thought, Ottoman and Turkish Studies, Ottoman Turkish
Games-related panel moderation: It’s Not Just a Game!: Soccer Culture in the Middle East and Beyond

John D. Kelly (Professor of Anthropology and Social Sciences)
Research: social theory; capitalism; nation and decolonization; anthropology of knowledge; semiotic technologies; Fiji, India
Author of The American Game: Capitalism, Decolonization, World Domination, and Baseball

Thomas Lamarre (Professor, Department of Cinema and Media Studies and East Asian Languages and Civilizations)
Research: Media history and theory; animation and new media; critical race studies; transnational television; animal studies; science and technology studies; Japanese and continental philosophy; ritual theory and practice; early and medieval Japanese culture

Sarah Edmands Martin (Associate Professor, Department of Cinema and Media Studies) 
Research and Practice: speculative design; visual design; typography; animation; augmented reality; digital storytelling; design history; game design; data visualization; media aesthetics; media archives.

Cameron Mankin (Assistant Instructional Professor, Department of Cinema and Media Studies)
Research and practice: drawings, prints, artist’s books, and games exploring the role of rhetoric in the shape of public space and personal identity

Ada Palmer (Associate Professor, Department of History)
Research: Early modern Europe; the Renaissance, with a focus on Italy; the Reformation; intellectual and cultural history; postclassical reception of classical philosophy; Renaissance humanism; history of the book, printing, and reading; censorship and information control; history of science, religion, atheism, deism, heresy, and heterodoxy; secondary specializations in genre fiction, science fiction & fantasy, and anime & manga
Relevant teaching includes “The Italian Renaissance: Dante, Machiavelli, and the Wars of Popes and Kings,” aka the Papal Election LARP

Jason Salavon (Associate Professor, Department of Visual Arts)
Research and Practice: Art and computation

Thomas Sawyer (Writing Specialist, University of Chicago Writing Program)
Research: book history and knowledge-formation in the literatures of medieval Europe
Organizer of Medievalists Design Games

Takashi Shallow (Lecturer, Media Arts and Design)
Creative practice across spheres of art, media, theater, and music
Relevant teaching includes MADD 24820 Video Game Music Production and Sound Design

Ashlyn Sparrow (Senior Research Associate, Department of Cinema and Media Studies)
Research and practice: game design, game studies, Black studies, Black game theory, game development, games for social change, alternate reality games (ARGs)

Sandor Weisz (Lecturer, Theater and Performance Studies)
Research and Practice: puzzle design