Midway seminar: Anna Ishchenko
Welcome to the weekly IMS seminar!
Midway seminar for PhD student Anna Ishchenko. The opponent will be Péter Kristóf Makai.
About the seminar:
Preliminary title of the thesis:
Mood and Expressiveness in Narrative-focused Video Games
Abstract/Brief description:
In this still-developing project, Anna explores how an affective state of mood shapes specific narrative experiences in video games. Building on previous discussions of mood, emotion, and related concepts, and synthesizing them with enactivist approaches to narrative, she examines how video games employ their affordances to become expressive. Here, expressive refers to the ways in which formal qualities of video games (their aesthetics) function as “experiential thickening” mechanisms—activating embodied and cognitive experiential backgrounds of perceivers (Caracciolo and Kukkonen, Polvinen).
Short bios:
Anna Ishchenko, is a PhD student in English at the Department of Languages, Linnaeus University, Sweden. Her project is part of the graduate school "Multimodality and Intermediality: Humanist Research in a Digital World (MIDWorld)," and the Research Center for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies (Linnaeus University). Anna has presented her research internationally, most recently at the Haunted Modernities Conference (Cornwall, Falmouth University, July 2025), with the paper “You Have Dialed into Here and There Along the Echo”: The Melancholy of Voices in Kentucky Route Zero (2020). She also co-authored a paper with Pr Niklas Salmose: Salmose, N., Ishchenko, A. (2024). Anthropocene Nostalgia. The Routledge Handbook of Nostalgia. Routledge.
Péter Kristóf Makai, is an Assistant Professor in Game Studies at Kazimierz Wielki University, Poland. Péter recently finished his Crafoord Postdoctoral Fellowship at Linnaeus University in Växjö, Sweden. He has published work on Tolkien, games and worldbuilding. He is the Encyclopedia Chair of COST Action 18230, Interactive Narrative Design for Complexity Representations.
How to attend:
To attend the seminar online, please email ims@lnu.se