Roger Travis

Associate Professor

Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies

Education

A.B., magna cum laude with highest honors in classics, Harvard College, 1990

M.A., Comparative Literature, U.C. Berkeley, 1992

Ph.D., Comparative Literature, U.C. Berkeley, 1996

Areas of Expertise

Video Games, Digital Culture, Classics, Homeric Epic, Greek Tragedy

Bio:

Roger Travis is an Associate Professor of Classics in the Department of Literatures, Cultures & Languages of the University of Connecticut. He is also the Director of the Video Games and Human Values Initiative at UConn, an interdisciplinary online nexus for scholarly activities like monthly symposia and “playversations.” He received his Bachelor’s degree in classics from Harvard College, and his Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of California, Berkeley before arriving at UConn in 1997. He has published on Homeric epic, Greek tragedy, Greek historiography, the 19th C. British novel, HALO, and the massively-multiplayer online role-playing game. He has been President of the Classical Association of New England and of the Classical Association of Connecticut. He writes the blog Living Epic about the fundamental connection between ancient epic and the narrative video game, and is a founder and contributor of the collaborative blog Play the Past. Roger also works on developing and studying a form of game-based learning, practomimetic learning, in which learners play the curriculum as an RPG wrapped in an ARG.

Curriculum Vitae