Rate My Professor Dave Ciccoricco

Professor David Ciccoricco serves as Professor and Head of Programme in English and Linguistics at the University of Otago, within the School of Arts in the Humanities Division. He holds a BS in Journalism from the University of Colorado, a BA Honours from the University of Canterbury, and a PhD from the University of Canterbury. His research specializations encompass contemporary narrative fiction and the theory and poetics of narrative art, with a particular emphasis on the convergence of digital technology and literary texts, including network fiction. Ciccoricco investigates digital fiction, poetry, art, and culture; post-humanist discourse; media studies involving language, multimedia, and multimodal texts in digital culture; gender studies and digital technology; British and Irish as well as American modernist writing and culture; American postmodernist writing and culture; and the aesthetics of repetition. Actively engaged in the Digital Humanities Hub at Otago, he has hosted seminars and open sessions on topics such as digital literature and simulation in videogames.

Ciccoricco is the author of key monographs Reading Network Fiction (2007), which examines pre-Web and Web-based digital fiction, and Refiguring Minds in Narrative Media (2015), applying cognitive approaches to narrative across print novels, digital narratives, and story-driven videogames. His influential contributions include 'A [S]creed for Digital Fiction' (2010), 'Focalization and Digital Fiction' (2012), and 'Narrative Media: The Impossibilities of Digital Storytelling' (2018). Recent publications feature 'E-Legitimate Offspring: Tracing Literary and Ludic Convergence' in Humanities (2025) and 'If You Give a Narratologist a Muffin: Storying the Object-Oriented Associative Impulse' in Style (2025). He delivered his Inaugural Professorial Lecture, 'Screenshots from the Literary Apocalypse,' at the University of Otago in November 2025 and presented at conferences including the Electronic Literature Organization. Ciccoricco co-created the digital literary work BabyHex, which received an Honourable Mention in 2025. His scholarship has shaped discourse in digital narratology and experimental literature.