About the Center
About the Center
Goals
- Attract and retain students to RIT and programs, majors, and minors located in the College of Liberal Arts;
- Demonstrate to the campus and wider community the vital role the disciplines of the Liberal Arts play in daily life; and
- Provide opportunities for Liberal Arts faculty to create interdisciplinary connections with colleagues in other colleges.
Programming
The Center will host a variety of scholarly programming relating to worldbuilding and storytelling, including visiting speakers, lecture series, interdisciplinary symposiums, poster sessions, conferences, and developing credit-bearing experiences for students.
Artistic programming relating to worldbuilding and transmedia storytelling will include, but not be limited to, visiting artists, reading and viewing series, creative workshops, exhibitions, and developing credit-bearing experiences for students.
Unless expressed otherwise, all Center programming and activities are free and open for all faculty, staff, students, and the public to attend.
About the Director
Trent Hergenrader, Ph.D., is an associate professor in the Department of English in the College of Liberal Arts, specializing in creative writing.
His research resides at the intersection of creative writing studies, digital pedagogy, and games and game-based learning. He is the author of “Collaborative Worldbuilding for Writers and Gamers” (2018), and with his co-author Stephen Slota, a Ph.D. in educational psychology, he is currently writing “The Worldbuilding Workshop: Teaching Critical Thinking through World Modeling, Simulation, and Play” to be published by MIT press spring 2025.
He is also a co-editor of “Creative Writing in the Digital Age: Theory, Practice, and Pedagogy” (2015) and “Creative Writing Innovations: Breaking Boundaries in the Classroom” (2018). His short stories have appeared in the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Realms of Fantasy, Weird Tales and others; his work has received honorable mentions in Year's Best Fantasy and the Year's Best Science Fiction; and his fiction has been reprinted in Nightmare Magazine and Best Horror of the Year.
Since he arrived at RIT in 2013, Hergenrader has developed popular and innovative classes like ENGL 386: The Worldbuilding Workshop and ENGL 543: Game-Based Fiction, which uses tabletop role-playing games as an engine to drive students' fiction writing.
In addition to creative writing, he teaches literature and media classes that examine the sprawling storyworlds of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth, George R.R. Martin's Westeros from Game of Thrones, and George Lucas's Star Wars galaxy.
He also teaches ENGL 511: Advanced Creative Writing Workshop with the theme of worldbuilding based on historical worlds, a study abroad experience that spends two weeks of winter break in southern Spain touring the sites of the medieval Islamic kingdom of Al-Andalus. At Imagine RIT 2023, his study abroad class’s “Alt-Andalus: An Exhibit of a Medieval World That Never Existed” exhibit won the Fram Chair Award for Excellence in Applied Critical Thinking at Imagine for large group exhibits.