Drs. Michael Ford and Taylore Woodhouse

By Eve Zhu

Dr. Michael Ford is a new Lecturer at Park Hall, but also a familiar face. Dr. Ford came to UGA as a graduate student to get his PhD and finished his PhD in 2022. His research was in American poetry, especially long poetry and catastrophes in literature. The poets he has worked with are Langston Hughes, Alice Notley, and Muriel Rukeyser.

In fact, poetry drew Dr. Ford to UGA, as he is a published poet himself.

“I write poetry. I wasn’t part of the Creative Writing Program, but I came here to study poetry because I wrote poetry. I dropped out of college after high school, but I wanted to go back because I wanted to understand poetry better. When I went to graduate school, I wanted to be at a school where faculty were really involved in contemporary writing.”

As a writer, Dr. Ford has many thoughts on his teaching, especially the difference between teaching writing and teaching literature.

“I’ve taught a combination of first year writing and 20th Century American Poetry, Contemporary American literature, American Modernism, Multicultural Survey. The relationship between teaching writing and literature is quite complicated. I think teaching literature has a slightly different function. What I want students to take away from a literature course is a better understanding of literary history, an understanding of certain texts, and the skills to write their own literary criticism at one point. Whereas in writing courses, while I am presenting them with literature, literature is just an object to pay attention to, while they develop their writing skills. In both kinds of classes, I want to get students interested in what they are doing. I want to allow students to be able to connect with literature and language in general in a way that helps them understand why studying these things matter. Developing these language skills helps them understand their world better, and better understand issues of the world.”

He also enjoys finding ways to bring students closer to literature beyond the classroom. Last semester, for example, he took a class to UGA’s rare books library to examine books and broadsides published by figures such as Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks. The goal he said was to see how literature works outside of the classroom

Looking ahead, Ford is eager to continue developing both writing and literature courses at UGA: “With first-year writing courses that I really like teaching, very few of those students are English majors, and many come into the university with really good writing skills,” he said. “But essentially I want them to develop those skills in a way that allows them to prove to themselves that writing is useful and can actually make a difference in the way they think about problems and the world around them.”

At the center of both his teaching and research is a fascination with how literature grapples with large-scale events and disasters: “In some ways, I think that literature and wide-scale events intersect in interesting ways,” Dr. Ford said. “Literature can at least help us not only think about catastrophe but also reckon with the lingering trace of disaster in the text. Events we can’t fully capture drive writers to stretch and pivot in interesting ways.”

When I stepped into Dr. Taylore Woodhouse’s office in the English Department, I was greeted by walls covered with Final Fantasy XIV posters, perhaps a fitting backdrop for the department’s new Professor of Game Studies. Coming from a Communications background, much of Dr. Woodhouse’s former research was on fan and reception studies, gaming communities, and Esports. When I entered her office, she was working on her current book project tentatively named Playing on the Digital Edge.

Dr. Woodhouse’s current book looks into the digital divide since the 1980s of how “black neighborhoods and working-class neighborhoods have been documented to have had lower access to computers, but higher access to video game consoles and tablets. Video games were seen as a lesser form of accessing technology, as it is associated with fun instead of work like computers. I am interested in the ways the black community used limited access to to make interventions in the U.S. video game culture”.

The book plans to mostly think about the “instrumental function of Black Communities have had on the fighting game community of games like Super Smash Bros in building up regional and national communities in Esports.”

Intrigued, I asked how she feels game studies fits into the English department, especially Esports compared to the more conventional idea of perhaps narrative video games.

“A lot of the earliest work in game studies comes from English departments. For instance, the landmark book Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace by Janet Murray was thinking of video games as literature, understanding the possibilities for literature in video games, and understanding video games in literary terms. A lot of ways I think of what games, and how people consume them, is not so different from how people would think about novels. Studies of video games especially overlap with how people think of power and identity in literature, and there is place for interdisciplinary discussion."

“I was part of a cluster hire by the dean, in an initiative to bring more Game Studies to UGA. I think that there is also a new hire in the Computer Science department for game programming, and a new hire in the art department for animation. I am here to do cultural studies. So hopefully there will be a growth in Game Studies at UGA in the future.”

“What drew me to esports as well as what I think its connection to English is how players create stories around their game. Watch a tournament and you see how the relation between two players becomes a storyline in their community. On an industrial scale, there are for example the story of rivalries between two teams. In Esports, what interests me is players creating a narrative instead of the game supplying one. I had always been interested in community studies.”

I then asked about Dr. Woodhouse’s pivot from doing a Korean major in Undergraduate to Communications in her graduate studies, as well as the beginning of her interest studying fan communities.

“Esports in South Korea is evidently huge, one author called South Korea the center of esports. I initially wanted to study translation of Korean popular culture into English, especially K-dramas. I got into esports through the story of Korean stars. I went to KCon, and saw some guys with security, and I wondered who they were. They were Esports stars, and that was the beginning of my interest. 

“In graduate school, I made a hard pivot to esports. I was able to take 2 years away from Wisconsin back to Texas to ethnographic work in my hometown of Austin, to look at a particular gaming community there and see how people who run events there make sure that it is accessible to people of all racial diversity. What fascinated me was how they sustained diversity in the gaming community that is not typically seen as diverse. So I suppose my suggestion to graduate students is to not be afraid to pivot”.

Finally, as I am an international student from Shanghai, the home city to MiHoYo, I had to ask for her opinion on Genshin Impact. To my surprise, Dr. Woodhouse said that her next project may be on gacha games like Genshin.

“I want to look into how gachas use narrative to create an emotional relationship between characters and players, to make people to pay money for those characters. It also raises the question of whether narrative elements make gacha systems feel more—or less—like gambling.” This exploration is especially interesting since gambling is illegal in China, but gachas are legal.

“I also find it interesting that many players are fully aware of how predatory these systems can be, yet they actively negotiate their relationship to the game. I also want to study the fanfiction communities around gachas, because fandom offers players ways to engage with beloved characters outside of spending money.”

“The other project I am considering is looking at black fandom on Japanese cultural products, as I can speak Japanese.” Dr. Woodhouse explains: “Black people were fashioned to receive culture that was seen as “cheap and throwaway” and that for a long time was Japanese culture. Dragonball, Sailormoon for instance were broadcast on live TV, and were cheap forms of entertainment.” Dr. Woodhouse would like to explore how “black fandom of Asian popular culture is balanced against tension between Black and Asian American communities.” Dr. Woodhouse wants to “start with the LA riots, and the opportunities of cross-cultural understandings that come around”.

What Dr. Woodhouse would like to share is that her main character in Final Fantasy XIV is only a couple of levels away from having almost max level in all classes. Outside of gaming, her favorite K-drama is Reply 1998, and if pressed to choose a favorite K-pop group, she says it would be TWICE.