Becky Anderson

Becky Anderson completed a BA (English; French Studies) and MA (Literary Studies) at Waterloo. Now a PhD recipient from the Department of English Language and Literature, she also concurrently pursued a Graduate Diploma in Cognitive Science. She’s the recipient of the Provost Doctoral Entrance Award (2015-2016), a Jack Gray Fellowship (2016-2017), a W.K. Thomas Graduate Scholarship (2017-2018), and an Ontario Graduate Scholarship (2017-2018).

Funded by a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship (2018-2020), her research explores fantastic fictional worlds, like Middle-earth, Westeros, or the Wizarding World, and examines the places of these worlds across different mediums to consider what elements make these worlds convincing spaces to inhabit. Her research also considers the communities created around and in the digitally adapted spaces of these fantastic fictional worlds to assess what kinds of self-construction emerge in these virtual locales and how such self-construction reciprocally affects the living culture of the game.

In 2018, Becky attended several conferences to present her reasearch, such as:

“Mapping the Reputation of Tolkien's Middle-earth in Standing Stone's Lord of the Rings Online”. Empire as Influence Panel. Canadian Game Studies Association. Congress 2018: “Gathering Diversities”, University of Regina, Regina, Saskatchewan.

“Figuring Affective Phenomena: The Architectures of Machine Emotion”. Workflows & Architectures Panel. Canadian Society for Digital Humanities. Congress 2018: “Gathering Diversities”, University of Regina, Regina, Saskatchewan.

“Architecting Space: Exploring J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth in Digital Game Adaptations”. “Digital Humanities in the Nordic Countries”. Games as Culture Panel DHN. University of Helsinki. Helsinki, Finland, March 2018.

Contacts:

Email: r3anders

LinkedIn

Twitter: @beckyanderson35