Research Team

Our team working on interactive narrative consists of a faculty lead, two graduate research advisors, and a group of talented undergraduate researchers.

Faculty Project Lead


Jeremy Douglass (Assistant Professor of English, UCSB)

Jeremy Douglass is an Assistant Professor of English at University of California, Santa Barbara, where he directs the Digital Arts and Humanities Commons. Douglass currently conducts research on interactive narrative, electronic poetry, and games, with a particular focus on applying the methods of software studies, critical code studies, and information visualization to the analysis of digital texts. Douglass been supported by agencies including the NEH Office of Digital Humanities, MacArthur Foundation, Mellon Foundation, ACLS, Calit2, HASTAC, and NERSC.


Graduate Research Advisors


Alanna Bartolini (English Ph.D. Student, UCSB) 2017-18

Alanna, one of the Graduate Research Advisors of the Transverse Reading project, hails from Montreal, Canada. With research interests including the digital humanities, archive theory, and Victorian Gothic epistolary novels, she is largely interested in databases’ potential to serve as digital editions and to perform narrativity. She loves languages, speaking English, French, and Italian fluently, Spanish and Mandarin poorly, and reading German, Latin, and the other romance languages (Portuguese, Catalan, and Romanian). For this reason, Alanna leads the Foreign Language Research Team, fondly nicknamed “i stranieri,” - a playful double entendre on “strangers” in Italian, meaning both “the foreigners” but also “the odd ones” - and of whom she is proud to be head straniera.



Ryan Leach (English Ph.D. Student, UCSB) 2017-18

Ryan’s research traverses the fields of digital humanities, media theory, and science and technology studies. He’s primarily interested in new materialist approaches to media technologies and multimedial interaction. As Graduate Research Advisor of the Transverse Reading project, Ryan leads the Genre Research team in the search for recurring generic patterns in gamebook narrative structures.


Undergraduate Research Fellows


Sami Stebbins (3rd-year Communication Major/ Spanish and Professional Writing Double Minor, UCSB) 2019

Sami just finished two years juggling the UCSB Honors Program, UCSB Division One Water Polo, and her incredible obsession with Spider-Man, and continues to pursue her major in Communication with the hope of one day going into a job in Public Relations. Her dream is to one day embark on an adventure so grand that the world sings her praises for years to come, but in the mean time she gets her thrills coding Doctor Who gamebooks for the Transverse Reading Project–– an adventure altogether electrifying in its own right. She is quite interested in how gamebooks have the potential to be a teaching force for audiences to learn about the consequences of their actions.





Sarah Cifranic (3rd-year English Major/Linguistics Minor, UCSB) 2017

Sarah enjoys studying language and narratives. She is pursuing a minor in linguistics, and enjoys reading science fiction and classic literature. While working on the Transverse Reading Project, she has become interested in researching variations between Spanish translations of a text. She is especially interested in whether these differences are prevalent within specific genres.



Annette Ding (3rd-year Psychology and Comparative Literature Double Major, UCSB) 2017

Annette is an international student from China who is pursuing a minor in translation studies. In her free time, she likes to read, particularly fantasy novels, and more recently she has kindled an interest in Chinese historical dramas. Research for the Transverse Reading Project has lead her to an interest in the significance of title differences between different translated versions.



Rachael Grainger (4th-year Film/Media Studies and Communication Double Major, UCSB) 2017

Rachael is interested in new media, technology, and culture. In addition to research and coursework, Rachael works as a graphic artist for UCSB Associated Students and has a cat named Pluto. She is interested in how metadata and graphs interact across foreign language gamebooks.



Michael Loose (4th-year English Major, UCSB) 2017

One of the very few Renaissance studies majors on campus has somehow led Michael Loose to pursuing gamic study in literature, and a hopeful minor in UCSB’s writing program. Hobbies include table top gaming, aestheticism, and Taco Bell crunchwrap supremes. What interests him the most about the Transverse Reading Project is looking at chance and reader choice, the effect of both willingly and unwillingly going through certain paths in stories, and how that changes our perspective of the medium.



Kylie McGregor (3rd-year Communication Major/English Minor, UCSB) 2017

Kylie is an avid reader and is pursing a minor in English. In her spare time, Kylie enjoys writing and cooking at home, as well as hiking on the weekends. While working on Transverse Reading project, she has taken an interest in the varied endings of game books and how they differ across genre.



Sarah Oxford (3rd-year Film and Media Studies Major/English Minor, UCSB) 2017

Sarah is interested in experimental storytelling across multiple platforms, including books and film. Her passions include painting, writing poetry, and being outdoors. Within the Transverse Reading project, she has become interested in comparatively studying authors in the Choose Your Own Adventure series.



Juliet Way-Henthorne (4th-year English Major/Professional Writing Minor, UCSB) 2017

Juliet’s primary interests include speculative fiction, intersectional & socialist feminism, creative writing, and indie horror. On weekends, you’ll find Juliet buried in grad school applications or napping with her dog. While working on the Transverse Reading project, she has become increasingly interested in the relationship between genre and narrative patterns, as well as the often overlooked value of visualizing elements like location and timeline in all literature.



Yee-Ann Wong 2017

Yee-Ann is interested in the unique process of writing gamebooks. She is almost always found studying (read: procrastinating), SCUBA diving, writing her own short stories, or traveling across southern California to visit her friends and family. While doing research with the Transverse Reading project, she has become particularly interested in the different localizations of gamebooks to and from foreign regions.