Dr. Taylor Orgeron is an Assistant Professor of English in the Department of Language & Literature at Southwestern Oklahoma State University since Fall 2019. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of English at Louisiana State University in May 2019. She received her master’s degree in Humanities from the University of Dallas in 2015. Her areas of interest include 20th and 21st century digital rhetoric & culture, digital pedagogy, multimodal composition, and video game studies. Most of her work involves examining the narratives (and critical metanarratives) of indie video games and experimental hypertexts in order to uncover how these texts help shape the national, regional, and personal identities of their players/readers. As a proud native of south Louisiana, Dr. Orgeron enjoys Cajun cooking and playing with her dog, Bayou Teche—when she isn’t playing video games, of course.
Her dissertation, “Intertwined Markings: Metafiction in the Digital Age” argues for the ways in which both contemporary indie video games and contemporary hypertexts use metafiction in order to explore the materiality of their medium, as well as the materiality of their readers/players. Additionally, by highlighting the two-way circuitry of influence between early hypertexts/video games and works of postmodern metafiction in “Intertwined Markings,” she hopes to revise current assumptions about the relationship between video games and literature, by exploring how and to what end contemporary novels and video games exist in direct lineage to their postmodern metafictional predecessors, even while showcasing methods wholly marked by digital technologies. For more information, see the Research page.