Biography
TreaAndrea M. Russworm earned her A.B. at Brown University and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. An interdisciplinary media scholar, Russworm’s areas of focus include video games and digital media, African American popular culture, film and media studies, psychoanalytic and postmodern theories, and post 1950’s American popular fictions. She is a Series Editor of the book series Power Play: Games, Politics, Culture (Duke University Press) and she was an inaugural Associate Editor of Outreach and Equity for the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies.
Russworm is currently writing a new monograph on the popular video game franchise The Sims, and she is co-editing a book on speculative culture, antiracism, and games. She recently edited a double special issue on Blackness and Play in the American Journal of Play (Winter/Spring 2022). She is also the author or editor of three other published books: Blackness is Burning: Civil Rights, Popular Culture, and the Problem of Recognition Gaming Representation (Wayne State University Press, 2016); From Madea to Media Mogul: Theorizing Tyler Perry (University of Mississippi Press, 2016), and Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Video Games (Indiana University Press, 2017). In Blackness is Burning Russworm argues that humanizing, or trying to represent in narrative and popular culture that #BlackLivesMatter, has long been a barely attainable and impossible to sustain cultural agenda. The book is one of the first to examine the ways race and psychological rhetoric collided in the public and popular culture of the civil rights era. In analyzing a range of media forms, including Sidney Poitier’s popular films, black mother and daughter family melodramas, Bill Cosby’s comedy routine and cartoon Fat Albert, pulpy black pimp narratives, and several aspects of post–civil rights black/American culture, Russworm identifies and problematizes the many ways in which psychoanalytic culture has functioned as a governing racial ideology that is built around a flawed understanding of trying to "recognize" the racial other as human.
In Gaming Representation: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Video Games, with co-editor Jennifer Malkowski Russworm argues that the dominant exclusionary and dismissive attitudes regarding race, gender, and sexuality in game studies (and in public discourses about games) have misunderstood both the nature and importance of representation in the medium. In debunking the commonly-held suspicion that humanities-based approaches to game studies that centralize discussions about representation and identity are somehow less relevant to our tech-savvy and tech-orientated society, Russworm and Malkowski argue instead that “representation and identity are similarly complex systems that are always relevant to the ways in which games, codes, platforms—indeed, all technologies—are constructed.” The influential book’s central interdisciplinary intervention modeled a way for game studies scholars across fields to treat representation as “a system that functions as akin to—rather than as a distraction from—the discipline’s more celebrated, ‘hardcore’ objects of study.”
A passionate teacher who has been teaching at the college level for more than twenty years, Professor Russworm has taught popular and well-received classes at The University of Chicago, UC Berkeley, and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. At UMass Amherst she created and directed the specialization in Games and Interactive Narrative and directed the first student-led game design studio. Experienced in team-based learning (TBL) pedagogies, Professor Russworm’s project-centered classes on games and popular culture focus on the theoretical, cultural, and social utility of games and other media. She is the founder of Radical Play, a games-based public humanities initiative and afterschool program for BIPOC junior high and high school students.
Russworm’s scholarship and interviews have also been published in peer-reviewed journals including The Velvet Light Trap, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Feminist Media Histories, Frontiers, and The American Journal of Play. Her research has been shared on CNN, The History Channel, in podcasts, and on streaming platforms like Twitch. She is a video game Hall of Fame voter.