Dr. Emma Leigh Waldron is a Researcher in Internet Culture and a Lecturer in the Department of Informatics at UC Irvine, where she teaches courses on games and emotion, games and performance, and storytelling for interactive media.

Dr. Emma Leigh Waldron’s website

Dissertation: “Mediated Intimacy: Performing Sex on HBO, YouTube, and in Analog Role-Playing Games”

Emma’s research while at UC Davis focused on affective communities that coalesce around intimate performances of touch. She researched the mediated intimacy of ASMR videos on YouTube, and how sex is represented in larp (live-action role-playing games). She was interested in how definitions and manifestations of sexuality are negotiated, reified, and transformed through these practices. Her work was located at the intersection of performance studies and media studies, and questions the role of embodiment in sexuality, intimacy, and touch and was informed by feminist theory, queer theory, affect studies, and phenomenology.