Angela Cox comes to us from the University of Arkansas, where she received her Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Composition. Her research is on definitions of genre and popular fantasy media. She will be teaching English 103 this semester.
What are some of your hobbies or interests?
I like to dabble in pretty much anything creative that catches my eye. I’ve been sewing and doing other crafts for as long as I can remember; I learned how to spin yarn on a drop spindle when I was two years old. I also like to write fiction, especially fantasy novels, which is where my interest in researching National Novel Writing Month comes from. I’ve been participating (and winning!) every year since 2005, but I’m not sure if it’s for everyone. I also love analyzing video games, but I tend to play older games.
If any students want to come talk about video game analysis techniques or theory during office hours, I’d love to have that conversation and even help them with a project!
But, mostly, I just love cats.
Are you working on any projects at the moment?
Right now, I’m working on designing a research project that would investigate if quantity-over-quality approaches to writing, such as a National Novel Writing Month, where participants attempt to write 50,000 words of fiction in the 30 of November, have any positive impact on participants’ identities and abilities as writers. I’ve been curious about this for a long time, but there really isn’t any good research on it yet, just a lot of personal testimonials.
When are your office hours?
My office hours are Thursday, 10am-12pm and 2pm-4pm.
What is a piece of advice you would offer students?
I’d offer students two pieces of advice: go to class and go to office hours. The first is fairly self-evident, but the second took me a long time to learn as a student. It wasn’t until I was a junior in college at Ohio State that I figured out how important it was to talk to my instructors outside of class. When I was stuck and paralyzed on a paper, I went to my professor’s office hours to talk it through. He really went above and beyond to help me out, and the assignment became a formative learning experience for me.
Comments:
Congratulations, Angela! We know you will do well in your new position.
We miss you.
[…] 50,000 word novel in 30 days during November. Ball State’s English department is partnering with Dr. Angela Cox, the Ball State community (students, faculty, staff, anybody) and the Muncie Community to write […]
[…] An expert in English Rhetoric and Composition, literary scholar Angela Cox came to Play the Past with the intention of covering new ground in video game analysis. As her original Play the Past bio succinctly put it, “Angela specializes in literary approaches to video games and generally focuses on 20th century PC games as a literary period”. Joining Play the Past in Sept 2013, Cox was, within a short period of time, able to set new standards within the community for the critical analysis of video games as interactive texts. Privileging the literary toolbox and mode(s) of analysis allowed Cox to open up discussion about game genres beyond skin-deep assessments of genres as sets of technologies, features and conventions, in favour of more nuanced and layered understanding of game genres as aggregative texts. Cox’s fascination for classic Sierra-Online titles (and series) led to fruitful explorations of transmedia genres, in which she was able to demonstrate, via literary analysis, how video game culture as a whole had a surprising penchant self-reference in its explorations of form. […]