Judith A Pintar

Judith A Pintar is a Teaching Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with cross-disciplinary appointments across multiple schools and centers. She holds primary positions as a Teaching Professor in the School of Information Sciences, School of Art and Design, Russian, East European and Eurasian Center, European Union Center, and Center for the Study of Global Gender Equity. She is also an Affiliate in Informatics and a Research Associate in Sociology, demonstrating her interdisciplinary approach to scholarship and teaching.

Her educational background includes a PhD in Sociology. Her academic journey began with a creative career as a storyteller, recording artist, and touring folk musician before transitioning into academia.

Dr. Pintar's research spans the intersection of technology, narrative, and social science. Her work focuses on Social Informatics/STS, interactive AI, fostering programming literacy in social science and humanities through collaborative game design, interactive digital narrative, playful pedagogies, emergent learning, hypnosis and suggestibility, social narrative approaches to trauma and memory studies, global informatics, and Central Europe and the former Yugoslavia. She approaches these topics through a unique lens that combines her background in creative arts with rigorous sociological methodology.

Her recent publications reveal a consistent thread connecting digital storytelling, information science, and social justice. Pintar's work explores how interactive technologies can be leveraged for educational transformation, cultural understanding, and addressing social inequalities, particularly through game design and interactive fiction. Her scholarship bridges technical implementation with deep sociological insights about human experience.

Dr. Pintar has received notable recognition for her teaching and research:

• University Distinguished Teacher Scholar, Office of the Provost, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2020-21)
• Investment for Growth Grant for "Games @ Illinois: Playful design for transformative education" as Principal Investigator (2019-2021)
• Migration and Refugees in Regional and Global Perspectives Initiative Grant for "Fostering Empathy for Latin American Migrants through Game Design," Co-Principal Investigator with Colleen Murphy (2019-2021)

She teaches courses including IS 101 Introduction to Information Science, IS 145 Mapping Inequalities: Programming the Illinois Map, IS 490 Playful Design Methods, INFO 490 Programming Interactive Fiction, and INFO 490 Seminar in Global Informatics: Computational Propaganda & Media Manipulation. These courses reflect her commitment to integrating technical skills with social awareness.

Dr. Pintar directs the Electronic Literacies & Literacies Lab, which is part of Informatics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This lab serves as a hub for her interdisciplinary work connecting digital technologies with narrative and social understanding. Her background as a musician and storyteller continues to inform her academic work, creating a unique synthesis of art and science in her approach to information studies.