David Heineman, Ph.D.

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David Heineman
Title(s)
Associate Professor
Department
Contact Information

Dr. Heineman’s research interests are located at the intersection of rhetorical/critical theory and new media technologies. He publishes his work across both academic and popular contexts.

Most recently, Dr. Heineman created The Pandemic Nature Project, a film that juxtaposes imagery of the natural world's calming beauty against the collective fear and social chaos sparked by the global COVID-19 crisis. Informed by a variety of contemporary autoethnographic methods, the film draws on ideas of theorists such as Jean Baudrillard and Kenneth Burke to offer audiences a framework for developing fresh perspectives about their own pandemic experiences. The film has been presented at international conferences and symposia and competitively screened at public film festivals. You can watch his presentation for the International Symposium on Autoethnography and Narrative here.

Dr. Heineman is also author of the book Thinking About Video Games: Interviews With the Experts (Indiana University Press, 2015), which combines interviews and essays to offer insights into the past, present, and future of video games, the field of Game Studies, and the video game industry. He was recently featured on NPR’s “Pop Life” podcast, discussing some of this research. He is also co-author (with Barbara Warnick) of Rhetoric Online: The Politics of New Media (Peter Lang, 2012), which considers the impact of digital technologies in both electoral politics and activist movements.

Dr. Heineman’s scholarship has focused on topics such as virtual reality, film, public memory, pedagogy, and gender. Dr. Heineman also has research interests in visual rhetoric, the rhetoric of science and technology, and narrative theory. He has published essays and other original work in scholarly journals such as New Media and Society and The Journal of Games Criticism and on popular media sites like Kotaku and The Solute. He has served as a reviewer for highly regarded journals including The Western Journal of Communication, New Media and Society, and Communication Quarterly.
Dr. Heineman teaches courses in the major such as New Media and Visual Culture, Community Leadership, Introduction to Game Studies, Rhetorical Criticism, Understanding Social Influence (rhetorical theory), Gender Issues in Communication, Persuasion in Popular Film, and Issue and Image Campaigns. He teaches introductory courses such as Communication in Everyday Life and Public Speaking and has also taught two interdisciplinary courses – The Art, History, and Culture of Video Games and Prison Scholarship (the latter of which is taught at The State Correctional Institute at Mahanoy).

In addition to his research and teaching, Dr. Heineman is active in areas of service. He has chaired the Bloomsburg University Tenure Committee and the College of Liberal Arts Curriculum Committee, served on various search and evaluation committees across campus, served as an advisor to the Lambda Pi Eta Communication Studies National Honor Society, chaired departmental program review, and is typically involved in a wide array of university, college, and departmental committees. In addition to organizing events such as public film screenings and various research symposia, he regularly gives invited lectures on campus and serves as a moderator for university colloquia.

Dr. Heineman earned his Ph.D. in Communication Studies from the University of Iowa, where his dissertation work focused on hacktivism. He earned Master’s and Bachelor’s degrees from Syracuse University’s Department of Communication and Rhetorical Studies.

His website is http://www.davidheineman.net.