I am a scholar and teacher of contemporary literature and culture. I am interested in how bodies of texts and textualities– forms and formats, media and material contexts, networks of production and reception– shape meaning, aesthetics, and value. I focus primarily on 20th and 21st-century experimental literature and digital poetics, but this means that I am deeply invested in book history and media theory.
I am currently at work on (just starting!) a passion project about 21st-century mermaid narratives. Yes, yes, I am writing about mermaids! I have loved mermaids since the age of 5 and am (finally) turning my scholarly gaze in their mesmerizing direction.
SDSU: I teach at San Diego State University, where I am Professor of English and Comparative Literature. I co-founded (with Joanna Brooks) and and co-directed (with Pam Lach) SDSU’s Digital Humanities Initiative, which is an unique addition to the Digital Humanities landscape because we imagine and lead our initiative according to feminist principles and for social justice purposes.
BOOKS: My most recent book, Bookishness: Loving Books in a Digital Age , was published with Columbia University Press in December 2020. It examines the fetishization of books in contemporary design, art, and literature and explains how books still give meaning to our lives in a digital age. It won the Electronic Literature Organization’s “N. Katherine Hayles Award for Literary Criticism of Electronic Literature” and was named an Outstanding Academic Title by Choice, a publishing unit of the Association of College and Research Libraries, a division of the American Library Association, 2022.
My first book, Digital Modernism: Making it New in New Media (Oxford University Press, 2014), reads contemporary works of digital literature in relation to literary modernism. I co-wrote, with my friends with Mark C. Marino and Jeremy Douglass, Reading Project: A Collaborative Analysis of William Poundstone’s {Bottomless Pit} (University of Iowa Press, 2015), which also won the Electronic Literature Organization’s “N. Katherine Hayles Award for Literary Criticism of Electronic Literature.” It presents a case study of collaborative interpretation for digital poetics by weaving together three radically different methodological approaches—close reading onscreen aesthetics, critical code studies, and data visualizations– into an analysis of a single born-digital literary work. I co-edited two volumes. Comparative Textual Media: Transforming the Humanities in a Postprint Era (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), which I co-edited with my mentor, N. Katherine Hayles, collects essays by a wide variety of scholars who analyze text across diverse media formats and historical periods to argue that literary criticism should reconsider how the study of text is a study of media. I also co-edited, with Kiene Brillenburg Wurth and Kári Driscoll, Book Presence in a Digital Age (Bloomsbury Press, 2018).
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Most importantly, I am a mother of two great kids who, like me, love books and love living near the beach…and I am in love with a very good man.
