Evan Manzanetti

Instructional Experience

Winter 2026

I am an associate instructor, teaching English (ENL) 3.

Past Courses

Fall 2025 (TA) CDM/ENL/STS 172: Video Games and Culture, UC Davis
Fall 2025 English 65: Introduction to World Literatures in English, CSU Sacramento
Spring 2025 English 198T: Senior Seminar on Narrative Theory, CSU Sacramento
Fall 2024–Fall 2025 English 3: Introduction to Literary Analysis, UC Davis
Fall 2022–Spring 2024 University Writing Program 1: Introduction to Writing Studies, UC Davis
Spring 2022 (TA) English 173: Science Fiction, UC Davis
Winter 2022 (TA) English 10B: Literatures in English II: 1700–1900, UC Davis
Fall 2021 (TA) English 144: Post–Civil War American Literature (1865–1900), UC Davis
Fall 2020 (TA) English 50A: Introduction to American Literature I: beginnings to 1865, CSU Sacramento
Fall 2020 (TA & Supplemental Instructor) English 40A: Introduction to British Literature I: beginnings to 1800, CSU Sacramento

Presentations

Playful Knowledge 2025 – “L.A. is Cops: Unmaking the City by Enforcing the Rules”

MLA 2025 - “They Played Us Like a Damn Fiddle: Noble Suffering and the Spectacle of Torture in the Maintenance of American Empire in Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes”

Playful Knowledge 2024 – “Empire Sans Frontières: Free Play without Freedom in the Metal Gear Solid Series”

ASLE 2023 - “The Mountain that Was the Biologist: Self-Making, Place-Making in the Strange Terroir of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy”

Coast to Coast Connections 2023 - “‘Become the Warmongers:’ the Normalization of American Military Hegemony through Graphical User Interfaces and the Mother Base Menu in Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker”

MLA 2021 - “Broad Sunshine and Dark Obscurity: Maps, Deeds, and the Restless Spirit of Nature in Gothic Hauntings of Hawthorne’s Land in The House of the Seven Gables”

CSUS Student Research & Creative Activity Spring Symposium 2020 - “A Somewhat Wilder Grace: Hawthorne, Humboldt, and Withstanding the Collapse of Nature into Symbol in The House of the Seven Gables”

ASLE 2019 - “Dead Things in the Glass: Interrogating Steinbeck’s Masculine Identity Built by the Aesthetic Consumption of Nature’s and Women’s Bodies in Cannery Row”

Research Interests

I research the environment, the Gothic, identity, and American cultures in American literature, broadly construed. I have an interest in the specifics of place-making, leading me to think about regionalisms, bioregionalism, borders, nationalism, race, gender, and other ways we tie space to identity and vice versa. Running through all this are my attentions to technology—how it shapes and reacts to our understandings of ourselves and our places, from daguerreotypes to video games to media at large.

Right now I’m thinking about space/place and how we define it, how it defines us, and why these interdependencies occur. I am currently working on my dissertation, a place-specific study of Los Angeles—how we speculate places by virtualizing them (in both video game and non–video game media).