CHRIS PATTERSON

Christopher B. Patterson is the award winning author of four books and an Assistant Professor in the Social Justice Institute at the University of British Columbia. His writing and teaching focuses on video games, new media, and creative arts. His most recent book, Open World Empire: Race, Erotics, and the Global Rise of Video Games (New York University Press, 2020), argues that video games are embedded in histories of colonialism and present day forms of IT empire (the "open world empire"), and explores how games offer ways of understanding these power dynamics through "Asiatic" and "erotic" forms of play. He is currently co-editing the anthology Made in Asia America: Why Video Games Were Never (Really) About Us. Under his matrilineal name, Kawika Guillermo, he wrote the award winning novels Stamped: an anti-travel novel (2018), and All Flowers Bloom (2020). His first book of prose-poetry, Nimrods: a fake-punk self-hurt anti-memoir, is forthcoming in 2023.

Chris received his Ph.D. in English from the University of Washington in 2013. Before coming to UBC in 2018, he worked as a professor and educator in Gimhae, South Korea, Nanjing, China, and Hong Kong. In 2013, Chris founded the podcast New Books in Asian American Studies, and in 2020, he founded The JAAS Podcast. He currently serves as the Managing Editor for decomp journal, the in-house literary and art journal of GRSJ, and as the Book Review Editor for The Journal of Asian American Studies. His commitment to teaching was recognized in 2018 when he was awarded Hong Kong Baptist University’s Arts Faculty Early Career Teaching Award.