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Faculty

Aimée Morrison: Associate Professor

PhD, Alberta
MA, Guelph
BA, York

Extension: 37533, HH 269
Email: ahm@uwaterloo.ca

 

Biography


I wanted to be a computer scientist until I was the only girl in all my high school courses.  So I pursued my second love, English, working my way around to computers again eventually, working in humanities labs at York and Alberta, and on funded electronic text publications at Guelph and at Alberta.  My work focuses on popular reception and remediation of computer technologies, as well as on design for digital media. Now I teach literature, digital humanities, history and theory of media, and multimedia practice.

Selected Publications


“Autobiography in Real Time: A Genre Analysis of Personal Mommy Blogs.” Cyberpsychology: Journal of Psychosocial Research on Cyberspace. 2010. (4.2): n.p. Web.

“Newfangled Computers and Old-Fashioned Romantic Comedy: You’ve Got Mail’s Futuristic Nostalgia.” Canadian Journal of Film Studies, 19.1 (2010): 41-58. Print.

 “An Impossible Future: John Perry Barlow’s ‘The Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.’” New Media and Society. 11:1-2 (2009): 69-87. Print.

“Blogs and Blogging:  Text and Practice.” A Companion to Digital Literary Studies. Ed. Ray Siemens and Susan Schriebman. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007. 369-387. Print.

"It's More than a Game:  Cinematic videogaming in the 1980s." TEXT Technology 13.1 (2004): 113-34.

Current Research


Increasingly, my research engages with emergent forms of social media as a set of complex and consequential rhetorical, literary, and social practices undertaken by ordinary people across the full spectrum of daily life. My current project, a book-length study called “Deciphering Digital Life Writing,” aims to produce a mode of criticism suitable to extant and future online communication tools, attuned to notions of personal identity, and to the constructive role of technology in mediating these online. Basically, I’m trying to figure out how people decide what to say about themselves online, and what motivates these decisions.

Grants, Fellowships & Awards


  • 2011: SSHRC Standard Research Grant , "Deciphering Digital Life Writing," 3 years / $58K.
  • 2009: SSHRC Research Development Initiative (4A status; internal funding), PI, with co-applicant Prof. Linda Warley (English)
  • 2008: UW/SSHRC Research grant
  • 2003: University of Alberat Dissertation Fellowship
  • 2000-2002: SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship

Areas of Graduate Supervision

  • Information technology in literature
  • Electronic textualities
  • Digital media
  • History and theory of media
  • Popular cybercultures