Campus Directory

Pronouns she/her

Division Arts Division

Department/College/Unit Film and Digital Media Department

Title PhD Student

Graduate Major Film and Digital Media

Affiliation Graduate

Web Site

Primary Office Location Communications Building

Mail Stop Film and Digital Media

Biography, Education and Training

Saramanda Swigart is a PhD student in the Film and Digital Media Department at University of California Santa Cruz, with an MA in literature from San Francisco State University (concentration in game studies) and an MFA in creative writing and literary translation from Columbia University. From 2014-2024 she taught composition, literature electives, creative writing, and rhetoric at College of San Mateo and City College of San Francisco, where she spearheaded the English Community of Practice, an Equity-funded program to pool teaching resources, provide equity training, and improve onboarding for incoming faculty. In 2021 she collaborated on an open-source rhetoric textbook, entitled How Arguments Work, published by LibreTexts, for which she wrote, among others, a chapter on the rhetoric of images. She designed the course “Engl 62: Videogames as Literature,” offered for the first time at CCSF in the fall of 2022, and taught “Video Games, Politics, and the State” at SFSU. Her graduate work investigates videogames as relics of culture, exploring the problematics and potential of the artform as seen through various theoretical lenses.

Research Interests

Videogames and postcolonial theory, queer theory, feminism, affect theory, mad studies, psychoanalytic theory, and deconstruction

Awards, Honors and Grants

SFSU:

• Sally Casanova Predoctoral Fellowship
• English Outstanding Achievement Award

Columbia:

• Summa cum laude
• Meritorious scholarship

Selected Presentations

• PAMLA 2024 Palm Springs, California, Nov 2024
• “Translating Empire: Stealth Gameplay as Queer Reframing of Power”                        
• SWPACA 2024 Albuquerque, New Mexico, Feb 2024
  “The Explorable Psyche: Videogame Space as Metaphor for Self”                                           
• PAMLA 2023 Portland Oregon, Oct 2023
  “Seeing Double: The Recursive Self and Psychological Repetition in Returnal”
• RMMLA 2023 Denver Colorado, Oct 2023
  “Who Has Control? A Dialogic Game Derived from the Crowdsourced Imaginary”
• MELUS 2023 Butler University, Indianapolis, Apr 2023
  “From Margin to Center: Autoethnographic Videogames Crossing Neocolonial Borders”
• NeMLA 2023 Niagara Falls, New York, Mar 2023
  “Playing Human: Psychological and Sociological Transhumanism in Videogames”
• HERA 2023 El Paso, Texas, Mar 2023
  “Playing Against Empire: Using Procedural Rhetoric in Autoethnographic Videogames”
• PAMLA 2022 Los Angeles, California, Nov 2022
  “Ludic Manifest Destiny: Colonial Metaphors and Postcolonial Resistance in Videogames”

Selected Publications

• LibreText: How Arguments Work: A Guide to Writing and Analyzing Texts in College: Contributor (Sept 2021)
• Visitant: poem, “The Cup of Trembling” (august 2021)
• Meadow: short story, “Untitled Requiem” (summer 2021)
• Azure: poem, “Love Letter to Language” (spring 2021)
• Glassworks: short story, “The Blind Feast with the Deaf” (winter 2021)
• Reed Magazine: short story, “Escape Artist,” (spring 2020)
• Hypertrophic Press: short story, “The House of Rumor” (fall 2018)
• Border Crossing: short story, “The Earth Falls to the Apple” (Dec 2016); Pushcart Nominated
• Oxford Magazine: short story, “Per Second Per Second” (Feb 2016)
• Superstition Review: short story, “Axiom of the Empty Set” (May 2015)