About Me

steve-spence-head-shot
Dr. Steve Spence
Professor of Media Studies
PhD, U Florida, 1999

Teaching

Links to the syllabi for my Spring 2024 courses are available in the header. In addition, I supervise the CMS 3901 internships.

Other recent courses include Zombies on Screens, Storytelling in Video Games and Introduction to Game Studies.

Contact Information

My contact information is collected on a separate page.

Selected Research

Two of my articles appeared in spring 2024:

  • “Adaptation, Violence, and Storytelling in The Last of Us” in Games and Culture
  • “Facial Animation and Empathy in The Last of Us Parts I and II” in Persona Studies (9.2)

In spring 2024, I delivered papers on storytelling in videogames at the Frontiers and Wastelands: The Boundaries of US American Identity conference hosted by the Universidad de AlcalΓ‘ in Madrid, Spain, as well as the annual conferences of the Popular Culture Association, the Georgia Communication Association, and the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.

In August 2021 I contributed to and curated a theme week for In Media Res called “Transmedia Vikings.” In 2017 I published two articles on Mathieu Kassovitz’s film La Haine:

My paper “History with a Soundtrack: YouTube, Vernacular History, and Tupac Shakur” is included in the conference proceedings from the first Tupac Amaru Shakur Collection Conference. My book chapter “The Virtual Spaces of Civil Rights” appeared in volume 2 of Cinephilia in the Age of Digital Reproduction (Wallflower – Columbia UP, 2012). My article “Globalization and the U.S. Civil Rights Movement” appeared in Public Culture (23.3).

Service

From 2021-24, I coordinated our department’s BA program in Communication and Media Studies. In addition to other duties, for five years I chaired the university’s Information Technology Council and current serve as a council member.

I am a member of Clayton State’s chapter of AAUP, the American Association of University Professors.