I’m Steven Gotzler a cultural studies scholar and English professor living in Chapel Hill, NC.

Originally from California, I was born and raised in the high Mojave desert just east of the Sierra Nevadas near Death Valley. I attended undergraduate at the University of California at Santa Cruz, where I earned a BA in American Studies with highest honors. After leaving Santa Cruz, I worked as a research assistant at the University of Pittsburgh, before going on to earn an MA in Literary and Cultural Studies from Carnegie Mellon University in 2012. I then taught as an adjunct instructor at Robert Morris University and the Community College of Allegheny County, before pursuing my PhD at CMU where I achieved candidacy in 2016. I completed my PhD in Literary and Cultural Studies at CMU in 2021. In 2022, I joined the faculty of the Department of English & Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as a Teaching Assistant Professor, where since 2023 I have also served as the Associate Director of the Digital Literacy and Communications Lab.

My research explores the intersections of historical regimes of labor and work, cultural studies of games and play, and materialist theories of media and technology. I am co-host of the podcast Subject Matter: Table Top, which considers the rhetorical affordances of games as cultural objects and as a medium for building cultural knowledge. I also developed and co-edited MARXdown—a collection of online reading editions conceived as a resource for readers of Marx’s most important but also most challenging text, Capital Vol.1.

From 2018 to 2023 I served as a governing board member for the Cultural Studies Association (U.S.). From 2015-2020 I was a founding member of the Contemporary Marxist Reading Group at CMU.

My research activities have been generously supported by the Institute for the Arts & Humanities at UNC, UNC Global Affiars, A.W. Mellon Foundation, The University of Victoria, the University of Southern California and Los Angeles Review of Books, and dSHARP.

My writing has been published in venues such as The Los Angeles Review of Books, Ethnic Studies Review, and Lateral: The Journal of the Cultural Studies Association.

Find my full academic CV here.

For more information about what I’m currently writing please see the Writing page, and please see the Projects and Teaching pages for further details about my research and teaching activities.