About me

Hello! While I publish/present under J. M. L. Whittington, you may call me Justin (he/they). I was born and raised in West Virginia, only recently moving to Orlando, Florida to enter the Texts and Technology PhD program at University of Central Florida as a student.

Here, I also serve as Graduate Research Associate with the Center for Humanities and Digital Research, as well as a Graduate Teaching Assistant - Grader for the Games and Interactive Media Program.

Elsewhere, I’m attached as a Research Assistant to a John Deaver Drinko Academy Fellowship project awarded to Dr. Luke Eric Lassiter of the Graduate Humanities Program at Marshall University, which I joined during my Master of Arts in Humanities at the same institution. You can see the team pictured below convening a roundtable at the 2024 Appalachian Studies Conference, at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, North Carolina:

_{From left to right: Cat Pleska, Dr. Luke Eric Lassiter, Dr. Chris Green, Michael Tierney, me, Trish Hatfield, and Anna Osborne}

My work has been featured at (inter)national conferences, including the Digital Games Research Association, Popular Culture Association, and Appalachian Studies Association. I’ve additionally had my hand over the years in music, game design/development, programming, homelabbing, and language/linguistics, at both professional and hobbyist levels.

Research interests

The blurb I usually give is “sociopolitical phenomena of games and theme parks.” Breaking that down more specifically:

In games (video and tabletop):

• Intersections of games with international relations/postcolonialism
• Appalachian game studies

In theme parks:

• (Dis)ability and other bodily variation in the theme park
• Transgression in the theme park
• Theme parks as medium, theming as culturonics

A further interest of mine is in middle-state publishing, feed-forward scholarship, and public (digital) humanities.