New Faculty Spotlight: Nicolas Rueda-Sabater, Assistant Professor, Film and Media Studies.
We are delighted to welcome Nicolas Rueda-Sabater to the English Department at Rutgers University.
Professor Rueda-Sabater earned his Ph.D. in 2025 from the University of Chicago for a project on contemporary video games and gaming—an area of expertise that we look forward to adding to our curriculum. His book project, Playing Enormities, considers how gaming provides players with unique vantage points for interacting with large scale structures. Thinking through the development of gaming platforms from the 1970s into the present, Rueda-Sabater argues that gaming experiences create opportunities for players to imagine, name and interact with the large systems that shape our realities but remain hard to grasp in their enormity. Rueda’s project situates the reader within multiple frames of analysis—shuttling between the gamer experience, the media specificities that structure these worlds, and the larger global systems on which they rely and which they index.
The department is excited to be bringing an interdisciplinary scholar with Rueda-Sabater’s intellectual range to Rutgers. Students have much to look forward to in the courses he will be offering in subjects ranging from classical cinema to the latest on narrative in video games.