I am a scholar of 20th and 21st-century American literature. My work examines how technologies affect our understanding of aesthetics and reading practices. I pursue these  connections across literary and artistic experiments from the 20th and 21st centuries and across media forms.

For the last four years, I was privileged to be Assistant Professor of English at Yale University. I recently moved, with my family, back to my hometown in San Diego. After many years away, I am happy to be here, grateful to be a Visiting Scholar in the Literature Department at UCSD and a Lecturer in Sixth College’s Culture, Art, and Technology Program at UCSD, and I honored to hold an ACLS Collaborative Fellowship for 2012-2013.

I am finishing three books, all under contract with university presses:
Digital Modernism: Making it New in New Media reads contemporary works of digital literature in relation to literary modernism (Oxford UP); Close Reading Electronic Literature, a Case Study of William Poundstone’s “Project for the Tachistoscope: [Bottomless Pit]” (Iowa Press UP), with Mark C. Marino and Jeremy Douglass, presents a case study of collaborative interpretation for digital poetics and digital humanities scholarship by weaving together three radically different methodological approaches—close reading onscreen aesthetics, critical code studies, and data visualizations– into a close reading of a single born-digital literary work; and the volume, co-edited with N. Katherine Hayles, Making, Critique: A New Paradigm for the Humanities (Minnesota UP), 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’ve also started a new book project, Bookishness, which focuses on how 21st-century literature and literary culture—both in print and online— responds to the threat of an increasingly paperless and multimodal society.