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Matt Tierney

Matt Tierney

Associate Professor of English
Director, Digital Culture and Media Initiative
Honors Adviser
Preferred Pronouns: he / him
206 Burrowes Building
Mailroom: 430 Burrowes Building

Mailroom: 430 Burrowes Building

Matt Tierney

Spring 2024 Office Hours

WTh 12:30-2

Education

Ph.D. in Modern Culture and Media, Brown University, 2012
M.A. in Literature, University of California-Santa Cruz, 2006
A.B. in American Studies, Cornell University, 1999

Professional Bio

I teach and write digital and media studies with reference to cultural histories of the US Left and critical theories of technology and technologism.

I've published two booksDismantlings: Words against Machines in the American Long Seventies and What Lies Between: Void Aesthetics and Postwar Post-Politics —and my other writing appears in such journals as diacritics, Configurations, Cultural Critique, Camera Obscura, and Postmodern Culture, for which I co-edited a special issue on the topic of "Medium and Mediation." Considered praise of Dismantlings appears in American Literary History, in boundary 2 , and in The Year's Work in English Studies; and of What Lies Between in American Literature.

I teach graduate seminars like "Cultural Critique and High-Tech Capitalism," "Race, Gender, Medium," "Technoculture and Literary Politics," "Media/Culture," and "Reading Film." My undergraduate teaching ranges more widely, from human rights in digital society to science fiction, work and literature, community studies, film poetics, and critical reading. In recent years I've been interviewed on the topic of literature and technology with Public Books and on critical cyberculture with our Digital Culture and Media Initiative, which I now direct.

   

Areas of Specialization

Contemporary Literature

Social movement literatures; literatures of work; print media about nonprint media

Media and Digital Studies

Mediations of social change; cultural consequences of technologism; automation; intermediality; accountability; high-tech capitalism

Theory and Cultural Studies

Philosophy of technology; negativity and critique; history of theory; labor and management history; politics of race and gender; cultural and media studies

Visual Culture

Aesthetics and postaesthetics; conceptual art; political film movements; critical visual literacy