Logan Brown joined the faculty after completing a dual PhD in Media Studies and Informatics at Indiana University in 2024. His work analyzes the history of games and entertainment software broadly from a critical lens that aims to surface the invisible or obscured structures of power undergirding the digital economy in the 21st century.

Professor Brown is under contract with MIT Press for his first book project, tentatively titled Mobilizing Play: How Games Helped Cell Phones Conquer America. Mobilizing Play pushes back against the Apple-branded notion that mobile media – and our saturated, habit-forming mobile culture – began with the iPhone. Instead, it offers a close look at the formation of and strategies behind the early American mobile games industry to demonstrate that everything we associate with the iPhone, from deliberately addictive game design to app stores and platform economics, was really forged in this earlier period to suit the immediate economic needs of the telecom industry. He has also published widely on game culture, the history of computing, and capitalism in venues like Game Studies, Games & Culture, Technology & Culture, and New Media & Society.

Logan Brown teaches numerous graduate and undergraduate courses at the University of Iowa, including Games, Culture, & Society; Introduction to the Platform Society, Theories of Digital Labor, and Doing Game History.