I am a postdoctoral lecturer at Penn State, where I study the history of digital culture. My work inquires generally into the value of the humanities—and especially the critical, historicist, and decolonial strains of the humanities—amid the so-called digital age.
My book project, Computation and Critique: Two Cultures of Literary Method, 1945-1990, reconsiders the relationship between literary expertise and computational expertise since WWII. Although current debates surrounding Digital Humanities and "distant reading" tend to present computational savoir-faire as a relatively recent concern among literary intellectuals, I show that some of the definitive critical formations of the post-war era—and especially developments in feminist, postcolonial, and African American literary studies—already contain sophisticated methodological engagements with computers and computation. Through case studies of Christine Brooke-Rose, J.M. Coetzee, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Clarence Major, I excavate a counter-history of computational expertise: an expertise grounded not in the training or methodologies of data scientists, but in the critical theories of language and culture that, I argue, constitute the truly valuable intellectual products of the humanities in a digital age.
Peer-reviewed:
Other critical work:
I have taught the following courses at Penn State:
header image: Bela Julesz, "Experiments in the Visual Perception of Texture" (1975)