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Senior Lecturer in Writing, Bangor University

Dr. Lyle Skains has been at Bangor University since 2008, first as a PhD student with Professor Astrid Ensslin, conducting practice-based research into the effects of digital composition on creative writing practice and narrative. A Graduate Teaching Assistant from 2009, she was appointed to a lectureship in 2011, and currently serves as coordinator of the BA in Creative and Professional Writing degree and Director of Graduate Studies for the School of Creative Studies & Media.

Current research projects include:

– Publishing Digital Fiction: Exploring the commercialization (or lack thereof) of digital fiction (stories created and experienced through digital devices, such as hypertexts, literary games, and interactive fiction).
– Reading Digital Fiction: AHRC-funded project using empirical methods to examine the cognitive effects of reading digital fiction.
– Authoring the Posthuman: How Stories Shape Contemporary Culture through Technology. The project’s purpose is to create a “story-event” (a live, interactive narrative) incorporating modular electronics to explore how creating story with hardware-based technology affects the writer (me) and the narrative, and to explore the technology’s capacity for increasing human connection and sense of community.
– Digital Fiction/Body Image Project. Co-investigator with Professor Astrid Ensslin and Dr. Sarah Riley at Aberystwyth University. Conducting ethnomethodological research into how reading and creating digital stories can affect teenagers’ perceptions of body image.
– Computer Gaming Across Cultures. A UK-India Education and Research Initiative project conducted by Bangor University, West Virginia University (USA), and Jawaharlal Nehru University (India): a trilateral partnership researching massive multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) as objects and tools of study from 2013-14. (British Council funded.)

Experience

  • –present
    Lecturer in Writing, Bangor University