Leadership

Dr. Janet Murray is Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Affairs and Ivan Allen College Dean's Professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication.  She received her PhD in English from Harvard. Her primary research interests are interactive design, interactive narrative, and the history and development of representational media. Her widely known book, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, asks whether we can expect this new medium to support a new expressive art form, comparable to the Shakespearean theater or the Victorian novel in its ability to move and enlighten us. She is mostly optimistic about this possibility. Her textbook, Inventing the Medium: Principles of Interaction Design as a Cultural Practice (MIT Press, 2011)  unites the myriad traditional disciplines in which interactive designers are now trained into a single coherent digitally focused design vocabulary. Her eTV group creates prototypes of advanced broadband applications (http://etv.gatech.edu) . She has also worked on projects focused on engineering education (http://intel.gatech.edu) and on the elaboration of narrative schema for multisequential storytelling. In December 2010 Prospect Magazine (published in the UK) named her to an International list of "Top Ten Brains for the Digital Future."

Nassim Parvin is an Assistant Professor of Digital Media in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech, where she also directs the Design and Social Interaction Studio. Parvin’s research explores the ethical and political dimensions of design and technology, especially as related to values of democratic participation and social justice. Integrating methods of humanistic scholarship and design-based inquiry, her research answers pressing questions about the influence of digital technologies on the future of social and collective interactions. Her papers have appeared in premier publication venues in design studies, science and technology studies, and human-computer interaction. She is an award-winning educator and serves on the editorial board of the journal of Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, an innovative open-access journal in the expanding interdisciplinary field of STS. Parvin received her PhD in Design from Carnegie Mellon University. She holds an MS in Information Design and Technology from Georgia Tech and a BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Tehran.

Brad received his Ph. D. in Literature from the University of Miami in 2017. His work looks at the use of literary aesthetics as data management strategies in nineteenth-century American writing. He is also currently working on a digital humanities project that looks to quantitatively identify information across a corpus of nineteenth-century literary works. In his role as Lab Coordinator at DILAC, Brad looks forward to working with both students and faculty to integrate interesting uses of digital technology into humanities research.

Dr. Royster is Dean of Georgia Tech's Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts. She holds the Ivan Allen Jr. Dean’s Chair in Liberal Arts and Technology, and is Professor of English in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication. A graduate of Spelman College in Atlanta, Royster earned an M.A. and D.A. in English from the University of Michigan. Her research centers on rhetorical studies, literacy studies, women’s studies, cultural studies, areas in which she has authored and co-authored numerous articles and book chapters. 

She is the author or co-author of four books: Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1997), Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change among African American Women(2000), Profiles of Ohio Women, 1803-2003 (2003), and Feminist Rhetorical Studies: New Horizons in Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies (2012). She is the co-editor of two books:  Double-Stitch: Black Women Write about Mothers and Daughters (1991) and Calling Cards: Theory and Practice in the Study of Race, Gender, and Culture (2005), and the editor of an anthology for college writing courses, Critical Inquiries (2003). She was consulting writer for Writer’s Choice, a textbook series for grades 6 – 8, and co-editor of Reader’s Choice, a literature series for grades 9 – 12, both published by Glencoe/McGraw-Hill.

Prior to joining Georgia Tech in 2010, Royster served as Senior Vice Provost and Executive Dean of the Colleges of Arts and Sciences at The Ohio State University (OSU).