CURRENT PROJECTS
Tabletop in Academia: My current research is on games-based learning and the design of serious games (tabletop, not digital). I am interested in the history of these areas, as well as their current applications in higher ed.
Campus Paths: Beginning in the summer of 2020, I designed a tabletop game for career counsellors and academic advisors. Campus Paths was a collaboration with career counsellor Nat Perry. The project was completed and launched in the fall of 2022. Read more about it here.
UNB Tabletop Games Library: I received a 2019 UNB Teaching and Learning Priority Fund grant to start a tabletop games library on campus. The games are available for borrowing by UNB students, faculty, and staff. The initial curation of the library focused on acquiring a range of modern games (1990s-present) representing different genres, settings, and design mechanisms. Games were also chosen that had the potential to be used by instructors or researchers in various subjects areas on campus (science, nursing, history, political science, etc). More information on the library can be found here.
Fredericton Tabletop Game Designers: Seeing a need for an organized group to encourage and support tabletop game design in Fredericton, I started FTGD. The group has an active discord channel and holds monthly playtesting meetings on the UNB campus. Active members include faculty, staff, and students from UNB as well as several community members. Discord. Facebook.
PAST RESEARCH
Canadian Horror Film: My essay on Canadian horror movies entitled “The Bloody Brood: Canadian Horror Cinema-Past and Present” was published in the Oxford Handbook of Canadian Cinema (Oxford University Press, 2019).
New Brunswick – Film History, Culture, and Identity: With the help of University Research Fund grant, I have been researching the history of film in New Brunswick, with a particular focus on the relationships between representation and regional identity. Thus far, this research has been shared at four academic conferences and two publications in this area are nearing completion. Info related to my public talk on the travels in the 1920s of NB hunting and fishing guide W. Harry Allen to screen NB films in the USA can be found here.
Commercial Knowledge-Based Filmmaking in Atlantic Canada: In collaboration with Fredericton’s DOCTalks Festival and Symposium, I was the primary investigator on a 2015 Springboard Atlantic-funded project to investigate the potential for partnerships in documentary film production between Atlantic Canada’s film industry and the region’s academic researchers and institutions.
PhD Dissertation – Horror and Re-enchantment: A Supernatural Genre in a Secular Age (2010): My doctoral research was on American supernatural horror narratives in film and television in the 1990s.
Scott Preston 