Emily Friedman
Emily Friedman is a scholar and critic who wants to understand media experiences from audiences past, present, and future. This fascination has taken her to study everything from the language of smell, never-published manuscript fiction, creator cultures, and tabletop roleplaying games and their performances across the analog-digital spectrum.
She believes that technological shifts of the past illuminate our present, that book history and digital scholarship work beautifully together, that artists and designers and librarians and archivists are invaluable collaborators, and that hands-on experience of research and creative making are important components of student learning.
She is a historian of storytellers, and my work has appeared in places like LA Review of Books and Polygon. You can find her doing that across social media, on YouTube, and on Patreon, where she posts work in progress for free for subscribers.
Her next book, on the history and practice of Actual Play, will be out from MIT Press in 2027. She is also working on a book on the comic and roleplaying game DIE for U Michigan Press.
She is serving as the Public Humanities Fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Library in the 2026-27 school year. She’s exploring The History and Practice of Playful Media, exploring the games held by the Folger, and continuing to foster relationships between game designers, artists, scholars, and the Folger and other cultural institutions: work she has done across the US and UK.
Her most important labor is as hype-woman: both for undersung forms of creative expression past and present, and for the important work being done to transform academia... and beyond.
