Elizabeth Neumann (on parental leave)

Currently unavailable due to parental leave. Please contact instead the coordinator of the Chair, Susen Pönitzsch: poenitzsch@europa-uni.de.

The following interests are with respect to the medium of video games:

• Media aesthetics
• (Human-) Animal Studies and Ecocriticism
• Posthuman concepts
• Feminist philosophy

2023 – “Review: Game: Animals, Video Games, and Humanity, by Tom Tyler.” In: Press Start 9 (1). S. 92–95.

2023 – “Being Scared and Scaring Oneself in Video Games. The ‘Atmosfearic’ Aesthetics of Amnesia: Rebirth.” In: Art Style, Art & Culture International Magazine 11 (11), Special Issue Atmosphere and Mood. S. 19–39. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.7647574.

Talks

14/9/24 – “Guardians Astray. The Poetics of Parenthood and Othering in the Amnesia Games” with Katja Aller and Felix Schniz. Conference presentation for Video Game Cultures, online.

29/9/23 – “‘This is no place for mortals.’ Posthumanistische Spuren in The Pathless.” Presentation for the 8th annual KWG conference, Saarbrücken.

8/9/23 – “Womb of Woe. Exploring Pregnancy in Amnesia: Rebirth.” Conference presentation for Video Game Cultures, Klagenfurt.

19/5/23 – Participation on the Panel “Anthropozän und Posthumanismus in Lisa J. Kriegs ‘Drei Phasen der Entwurzelung’” at MetropolCon, Berlin.

16/9/22 – “The ‘Atmosfear’ of Amnesia: Rebirth.” Conference presentation for Aesthetics of Atmosphere in Intercultural Perspective, online.

15/9/22 – “Human-Animal Relations as Imagined in ABZÛ and The Pathless.” Conference presentation for Animals in the American Popular Imagination, online.

22/7/22 – Co-organiser of the Symposium DISCLOSURE. New Perspectives on the “Confessing Animal,” presentation “A Short Overview of Videogames and Confession,” Chair of the Videogame Roundtables, Berlin.

Video games have shaped my life ever since the first time my fingers touched a keyboard. My childhood was defined by “The Boy Who Lived,” unsurprising for Germany in the early 2000s. I didn’t just devour every new book of Harry Potter’s adventures, however—my sister and I also spent hours upon hours in front of the Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone computer game (EA 2001). Soon after my curiosity was piqued by my father’s forays into the MMORPG World of Warcraft (Blizzard 2004). I really fell in love at ten years’ old, when I put the fantasy RPG Morrowind (Bethesda 2002) into the disc drive. To this day I’m filled with an inexplicable sense of yearning, belonging and homesickness when I think of Vvardenfell.

This deep connection to the medium, a continued curiosity with gaming both personally and otherwise, and a desire to shed light on the seemingly inexplicable experiences, qualities and emotions that video games provide, brought me via literary studies and philosophy (BA 2019; MA 2022) to the dissertation topic that I am working on today as a research associate at the Chair for Popular Culture:

How do video games make animal (and thus also human) subjectivity experienceable, how do they conceive human–animal relations?

Education

since 10/22 – Dissertation under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Daniel Illger (EUV Frankfurt/Oder)

since 10/22 – Research associate at the Chair for Popular Culture (EUV Frankfurt/Oder)

4/21 to 9/22 – Member of the X-Student Research Group “Disclosure: The Language of Confession in New Media” under the leadership of Sonja Pyykkö, MA (JFKI @ FU Berlin/BUA)

7/22 – MA Angewandte Literaturwissenschaft – Gegenwartsliteratur (FU Berlin)

9/19 – BA Germanistik und Philosophie (WWU Münster)

Past semesters

Wozu denn noch Mensch sein? Essays zum Trans- und Posthumanismus (BA, Summer 2024)

Draufgeklickt, eingetaucht. Einführung in die Videospielanalyse (BA, Winter 2023/24)

Spielen, streicheln, schlachten – Das Tier und wir (BA, Summer 2023)

Grundbegriffe der Game Studies (BA, Winter 2022/23)