Dr Andrei Nae

BA, University of Bucharest, 2012
MA, University of Bucharest, 2014
PhD, University of Bucharest, 2017
andrei.nae@lls.unibuc.ro
Office hours: by appointment

COURSES TAUGHT

Video Games and Cultural Identity

BIO & PUBLICATIONS

Dr Andrei Nae is Lecturer at the University of Bucharest, Associate Lecturer at the Echo School of Technology, Digital Arts and Video Games in collaboration with Abertay University, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, vice-chair of Central and Eastern European Game Studies (DiGRA chapter) and educational YouTuber. At the University of Bucharest zie teaches the MA course “Video Games and Cultural Identity” alongside the elective courses “Understanding Narrative Communication in Video Games” and “Ideology in post-1945 Subaltern British Fiction.” Zie also teaches seminars in twentieth-century and contemporary British and American literature. Nae’s main research interest lies at the intersection of game studies, cultural studies, and narratology. So far zie has been involved in several research projects, the most important being “Colonial Discourse in Video Games,” where zie held the position of principal investigator. Some of zir most relevant publications include the monograph Immersion, Narrative, and Gender Crisis in Survival Horror Video Games published by Routledge in 2021, the article “From Saviour to Colonial Perpetrator: Manipulating Player Empathy in Silent Hill 2 and Silent Hill Origins” featured in the 2022 special issue Gaming and Affect hosted by Parallax, as well as the collective volume Video Games between Postcolonialism and Postcommunism that will be published by De Gruyter in 2025.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

Books and edited volumes

Video Games between Postcolonialism and Postcommunism. Boston and Berlin: De Gruyter, 2025.

Immersion, Narrative, and Gender Crisis in Survival Horror Video Games. London and New York: Routledge, 2022.

Horror Video Games as Procedural Narratives: Extreme Colonial Encounters in the Digital Heart of Darkness. Bucharest: Bucharest University Press, 2019.

Journal articles and book chapters

“Representing the Holocaust in Wolfenstein: The New Order: Ethics of Play, Thanatopolitics and State of Exception.” Memory in Exile: 80 Years since the Liberation of the Nazi Camps, special issue of Word and Text, eds.
Arleen Ionescu, Dana Mihăilescu and Adrian Tudurachi, vol. XV, 2025. pp. 127 – 140.

“From Saviour to Colonial Perpetrator. Manipulating Player Empathy in Silent Hill 2 and Silent Hill Origins”. Gaming and Affect, special issue of parallax, ed. Laurent Milesi, vol. 28, no. 2, 2022, pp. 179-194.

“From Male to Colonial Gaze: The Intersection of Patriarchy and Colonial Discourse in the Rebooted Tomb Raider Video Game Series.” Video Games and Spatiality in American Studies. ed. Dietmar Meinel. Boston and Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022. pp. 101-116.

“Playing with Shakespeare in Silent Hill 3 and Manhunt 2: From Reverence to Rejection.” Shakespeare and Gaming, special issue of Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation, ed. Michael Lutz. vol. 13, 2022.

“Can Artificial Humans Go to Heaven? Transhumanist Salvation in Shelley’s Frankenstein and the Hitman Series.” Religious Narratives in Contemporary Culture: Between Cultural Memory and Transmediality. eds. Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru, Dragoş Manea. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2021. pp. 180-199.

“Salvaging Patriarchy in the 2018 Film Adaptation of Tomb Raider.”  English Literature. Vol. 6, 2019, pp. 127-140.

(with Alexandra Ileana Bacalu) “Toward a Reconsideration of Hypermediacy: Immersion in Survival Horror Games and Eighteenth-Century Novels.” Playing the Field. Video Games and American Studies. ed. Sascha Pöhlmann. Berlin, 2019: De Gruyter. pg. 133-152.