Teaching Games and Game Studies, a book co-edited by UCF Pegasus Professor of English Tison Pugh, has received an honorable mention for the 2023 Teaching Literature Book Award.
The Teaching Literature Book Award (TLBA) is a national prize that recognizes the best book on teaching literature at the college level. The award is presented biennially by the faculty in the graduate programs in English at Idaho State University. Nominated books are judged by a committee of external and internal reviewers.
TLBA reviewers found the approaches in Teaching Games and Game Studies in the Literature Classroom “fascinating,” while stating that the collection makes a “strong case” for ways that game studies can encourage meaningful engagement with literary texts and can build important critical skills across humanities disciplines.
“Just as movies and film studies reshaped English departments in earlier years, video games and game studies are shifting the contours of literature and literary studies,” says Pugh. “I hope that Teaching Games and Game Studies in the Literature Classroom can productively contribute to these discussions so that students will benefit from considering the literary qualities of video games and the ludic qualities of literature.”
Pugh edited the book with Lynn Ramey, Professor of French, at Vanderbilt University. It was published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2022. Pugh also co-edited Jews in Medieval England: Teaching Representations of the Other, which won the Teaching Literature Book Award in 2019.
The winning book, “The Teaching Archive: A New History for Literary Study” by Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan, explores the history of teaching literature in the twentieth-century. The other title to receive an honorable mention was “Teaching Late-Twentieth-Century Mexicana and Chicana Writers” by Elizabeth Coonrod Martinez from DePaul University.
This year’s committee included Benjamin Hagen, Associate Professor of English, University of South Dakota; Jill S. Kuhnheim, Professor Emerita, University of Kansas and Visiting Professor of Hispanic Studies, Brown University; and Tarshia Stanley, Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs and Professor of English, Wagner College, and 2021 Teaching Literature Book Award Winner. Jessica Winston and Susan Goslee, ISU Associate Professor of English, also served on the committee.
More information about the award, including past winners, is available at isu.edu/english.