Matt Tierney

My fields include literary and media theory, cultural studies, and the literature and film of the United States. My particular interest is in Twentieth-Century aesthetic interventions into the politics of race, gender, and technology.

I have written two books—Dismantlings: Words against Machines in the American Long Seventies (Cornell University Press, 2019) and What Lies Between: Void Aesthetics & Postwar Post-Politics (Rowman and Littlefield Intl., 2015)—as well as articles and essays in books and journals including Configurations, Cultural Critique, Camera Obscura, and Postmodern Culture, for which I co-edited a special issue on the topic of "Medium and Mediation." I recently described for the Cornell Press blog how digital culture is best discussed as a continuing episode in the interlinked histories of labor and war, race and gender, power and money. A year ago, I was in residency at the Humanities Institute, pursuing a research project on presentism, Afrofuturism, and national criticism. Not long before that, I was interviewed on the topic of critical cyberculture for the Digital Culture and Media Initiative.

Next up, two more books. The first of these, Against the Present; or The Technological Society, Unfinished and Half in Ruin, theorizes speculative claims about "the present" to untangle some current knots of technocentrism, neoimperialism, and racist nationalism. The second, Megrim: A Media Theory of Migraine, theorizes migraine headache as a metaphor, method, and medium. In these and other writing, I trace the convergent interests of activist and multiethnic literatures with radical philosophy and digital critique.