Erica Halverson is an Assistant Professor of Learning Sciences in the Educational Psychology department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research interests have been shaped both by her academic training (she received her PhD from the Learning Sciences department at Northwestern University in 2005) and by her work in the “real world” (she is the co-founder of Barrel of Monkeys, a Chicago area non-profit arts organization). As a founding member of Barrel of Monkeys, she was involved in the design and implementation of a creative arts program that provides some of Chicago’s most underserved elementary school students with the opportunity to express themselves through writing and performance. Her dissertation work comprised of a two-year case study with the About Face Youth Theatre, studying the way they worked with youth - all of whom identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, or questioning – to tell the stories of their lives and then adapt these stories into scripted scenes for public performances.

Her overarching research interest is the intersection of identity and learning, in particular the dramaturgical process – the telling, adapting, and performing of personal narrative – as a sophisticated set of literacy practices that lie at this intersection. She examines this process both from a literacy studies perspective and from a developmental psychological perspective, asking questions about the literacy and performance practices themselves and about what these practices afford participating youth in terms of their struggles with positive identity development. As a learning scientist and former non-profit Executive Director, she is interested in how this knowledge can inform the design of future programs that purposefully engage youth in complex struggles of self- and community presentation through the performance of their life stories.

Halverson's current research focuses primarily on the application of the dramaturgical process to the practice of filmmaking. With an understanding that any definition of “media literacy,” must include youth as producers as well as consumers of media, this work seeks to document, describe, and design spaces where youth are engaged in production of new media. In particular, she is interested in the design of environments where youth produce films as a means to grapple with issues of identity and self-presentation.

Last but not least, Halverson is an avid (read: fanatic) fantasy baseball player and is beginning a line of research around "competitive fandom," the study of games like fantasy baseball which lie at the intersection between gaming and fan culture. In this work, she aims to understand fantasy baseball as both a gaming practice and a fan culture community in order to document and describe the richness of this subset of media literacy practices.

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