Office Hours
By Appointment
In the news
Education
PhD, University of Missouri
MA, University of York, England
BA, Bryn Mawr College
About Me
Emily C. Friedman teaches courses on British literature, book history, games, and playful media. Trained as a book historian, narratologist, and digital humanist, her work examines the history of cultural production outside of commercial mass media from the eighteenth century to today, from never-published manuscript fiction to analog games. Now one of the senior scholars and public intellectuals in the field of "Actual Play," a new media form where roleplaying games are performed for audiences, her research on the topic has appeared in multiple academic books and journals, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and the game media site Polygon. Her next book, The Actual History of Actual Play, is forthcoming from MIT Press (2028), and she is at work on a book on the comic and roleplaying game DIE for University of Michigan Press, a multiauthored critical companion to major Actual Play Dimension 20, and future work on microcelebrity and "nerd fame". In 2026-27 she is in residence in Washington, DC as the Public Humanities Fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Library.
Research Interests
long 18th-century British literature; adaptation; material culture; genre studies; performance studies; game studies; gender studies; history of the book; textual criticism; new media; microcelebrity studies
Publications
Representative Recent Publications
"Declaring Independence: The Search For Authenticity in Actual Play" Playing Outside the Mainstream: Essays on Indie Tabletop Roleplaying Games, Eds. Stephanie Hedge. Studies in Gaming Series, McFarland, 2025.
(with Maria Alberto) Actual Play as Actual Art (Introduction and In Focus dossier for Journal of Cinema & Media Studies)
"What we talk about when we talk about Fan Fiction” Eighteenth-Century Fiction special issue on “Refusing Eighteenth-Century Fictions” (Eds. Eugenia Zuroski and Manu Chander) January 2024.
"Critical Reception up to 1900." Daniel Defoe in Context, Eds. George Justice and Albert J. Rivero. Cambridge University Press.
“Novel Knowledge, or Cleaning Dirty Data: Towards Open-Source Histories of the Novel,” Data Visualization in Enlightenment Literature and Culture. (Palgrave 2021)
"'Is It Thursday Yet?' Narrative Time in Critical Role" in Roleplaying Games in the Digital Age: Essays on Transmedia Storytelling, Tabletop Role-Playing, and Fandom, Eds. Jennifer Grouling & Stephanie Hedge (Studies in Gaming Series, McFarland & Co. 2020)
"Ownership, Copyright, Ethics of the Unpublished" in Access, Control, and Dissemination in Digital Humanities (Routledge 2021)
Sample Public Writing
"Who Owns Dungeons & Dragons?" Los Angeles Review of Books (April 8, 2023)
"Fantasy Friends" The Rambling Valentine's Issue 2022.
Reviews and Analysis for Polygon (as Em Friedman)