Christienne L. Hinz

Christienne L. Hinz holds a Ph.D. in modern Japanese history from the Ohio State University and has recently retired as Associate Professor of History at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. For the first half of her career, Dr. Hinz researched and wrote on entrepreneurship among Japanese women of the 19th and 20th centuries but pivoted in the second half of her career to research history pedagogy best practices. Her specialty is game-based education, gamification, and tabletop/role-playing game design for university classrooms. Dr. Hinz teaches education game design for Central Michigan University’s Certificate for Applied Game Design and sits on the editorial board of CMU’s Center for Learning Through Games and Simulations, which juries and publishes education tabletop games. She is currently the Director of the Zenobia Award, an international competition that mentors and centers the voices of underrepresented history tabletop game designers. A Pushcart Prize-nominated writer and memoirist, Dr. Hinz’s work is forthcoming in Best American Essays 2024.