The Forest of Life: The Representation of the “Tree of Life” Metaphor across Media

Péter Kristóf Makai recently joined the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut as a KWi International fellow to study how theme parks are transmediated into digital and board games. He finished his Crafoord Postdoctoral Fellowship in Intermedial and Multimodal Studies at Linnæus University in Växjö, Sweden in 2020, where he studied how evolutionary theory is being communicated across media borders. He earned a PhD in English Literature from the University of Szeged, Hungary, where he wrote a dissertation on how cognitive literary theory, clinical psychology, disability studies, and contemporary English and American middlebrow novels represent autism spectrum conditions and fictional mental functioning. As a science fiction and fantasy scholar, he wrote on Tolkien’s legendarium and its legacy in worldbuilding and gaming for Tolkien Studies and Wiley-Blackwell’s A Companion to J.R.R. Tolkien; he has also published studies on Isaac Asimov and Philip K. Dick’s work.