RIDE Center Faculty Fellow - Michael Filas, Ph.D.

Michael Filas, Professor of English

Dr. Michael Filas's teaching and writing focus on 20th century American literature, creative writing, particularly fiction, and cultural studies. He researches and publishes articles and stories about medical humanities and postevloution, particularly cultural representations of embodied human hybrids, from AI robots to clones, androids, and other types of manufactured humanity. His teaching work includes creative writing and American literature and culture, and film. 

Michael filas, ride

Projects

ENGL242 "Virtual Reality & Writing Fiction" (S'25)

  • Dr. Filas utilized RIDE Center virtual reality goggles as a writing prompt for fiction writers in his ENGL242 Writing Fiction course, allowing them to experience either flying or walking to the edge of a cliff for a maximum of 5 minutes.
  • This experience in the RIDE Center resulted in a diverse collection of entries, each showing the authors' individual voices and perspectives.
  • In the context of other fiction writing prompts, this experience involved technology, including classmates sharing the headsets and helping each other get oriented. That sort of collaboration had not previously been part of our prompts, which enhanced critical thinking among the students.

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