Bradley Markle

Professional Bio

Bradley Markle is an Associate Teaching Professor at The Pennsylvania State University whose work sits at the intersection of digital humanities, media studies, and postmodern literature. His research emphasizes interactive media and emerging technologies, particularly artificial intelligence and its implications for writing, pedagogy, and creative production.

Markle's media studies research examines how digital and interactive media disrupt traditional narrative hierarchies, authorship, and reader–player relationships. Drawing on videogames, mods, and interactive storytelling, his work explores metalepsis, procedural rhetoric, and player agency as central formal and theoretical concerns. His dissertation develops a sustained account of videogames as fundamentally metaleptic texts, situating interactive systems as sites of ontological and rhetorical play rather than merely narrative delivery mechanisms.

In more recent work, Markle extends this framework to artificial intelligence, approaching AI not as a replacement for human authorship but as a possibility space for creative exploration, curation, and pedagogy. He is particularly interested in how generative systems reshape writing practices, classroom labor, and collaborative authorship across digital media. His research has been presented multiple times at the Popular Culture Association and the Southwest Popular / American Culture Association, with a focus on videogames and interactive media, as well as at Drexel University, where he has presented on artificial intelligence and creative practice.