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Professional Bio

David Neville is a Digital Liberal Arts Specialist in the Grinnell College Digital Liberal Arts Collaborative. He is also the project director for the Immersive Experiences Lab, an interdisciplinary community of inquiry and practice exploring new ways to approach liberal arts topics through the research and development of extended reality (XR) experiences, and the PI for an NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant (Level I) that supports the creation of an immersive virtual reality experience for visualizing a Viking longship, and understanding the social, linguistic, cultural, political, and economic roles that the longship played in the Viking Age.

Originally trained as a medievalist and Germanist, David is the author of over 50 articles, posters, and presentations on topics related to the digital humanities, immersive computing, digital game-based learning, blended learning, business German, and the medieval German mystic Mechthild of Magdeburg. His scholarly work investigates how XR experiences can best be designed, developed, and deployed to support humanistic learning in two ways. First, it examines the learning that occurs in the student teams while creating these XR experiences and how this learning can be used to complement or challenge existing post-secondary pedagogical approaches. Second, it investigates how user activity in an XR experience can help learners generate mental narratives that can be used to structure, organize, and process situated and procedural knowledge. David is especially interested in how these narratives can be used to teach a second language and culture.

David holds a PhD (Washington University in St. Louis, 2002) in German Language and Literature and a MS (Utah State University, 2007) in Instructional Technology and Learning Sciences. Prior to his arrival at Grinnell College, David was Associate Professor of German and founding director of the Business German Program at Elon University. In his spare time, David enjoys running, lifting weights, hiking and camping, playing the classical and bass guitars, and practicing the traditional Japanese martial art of aikido, in which he holds the rank of shodan.

Education

MS	Utah State University (Logan, Utah, USA, 2007) Instructional Technology and Learning Sciences Concentration in Computer Science; Business Information Systems
PhD	Washington University in St. Louis (Missouri, USA, 2002) German Language and Literature Concentration in Latin Language and Literature; Medieval Studies
	Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (Munich, Germany, 1999-2000) DAAD Annual Scholarship (Jahresstipendium)
AM	Washington University in St. Louis (Missouri, USA, 1997) German Language and Literature
BA, Honors	Brigham Young University (Provo, Utah, USA, 1994) German Language and Literature Minor in Russian Language and Literature

(Photo by Justin Hayworth/Grinnell College)