Christopher Jeansonne is a Senior Lecturer in the Communication and Media Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
Chris does research in gameful learning, which applies the principles of game design to education, and in critical media pedagogy, which uses strategies that help students explore how identities are established within and articulated through popular culture media. He has led numerous gameful learning professional development initiatives at RPI, including as the co-organizer for the 2023 and 2024 Gameful and Immersive Learning Symposium, the 2024 Innovative Pedagogy Fellowships for Faculty, and the 2025 Reflective Pedagogy Workshops. His dissertation entitled 'Superheroes in the Classroom, Or: An Autoethnography of Great Power, Responsibility, and Community in a Critical Media Pedagogy' was the recipient of the 2019 Manuel Barkan Dissertation Award.
Chris does archival research and interpretive analysis of popular culture media, focusing on such topics as adaptations between narrative and ludic forms, transnational cinema, and transmedial genres such as superheroes. He has had articles and book chapters published on the above topics, and he is currently co-writing a monograph on the Tolkien-inspired board game War of the Ring for the Tabletop Gaming series from University of Michigan Press (forthcoming, with Maurice Suckling from the RPI Games and Experiential Media department).
Drawing on his background in media production, Chris highlights intersections between critical and creative work through arts-based and project-based teaching strategies, and he brings his theory into his personal practice by designing analog games for the classroom and beyond. He is currently developing '200-Year-Old Vampires: Reflecting on Motion Picture History', a game-as-class that uses a tabletop roleplaying framework for studying the history of the photographic image and motion pictures.
Prior to his work in academia, Chris was a filmmaker working on both commercial and independent film projects, and was the founder and chair of an award-winning media arts program at The Willow School in New Orleans. From 1999-2006, he lived and taught in Japan, first as an ESL iteacher for the Ibukiyama Board of Education, and later as the co-director of the ESL program at Seisen University in Minami-Hikone, where he also taught American culture and film and was the lead instructor of the Aikido Club.