Matt Tierney

My fields include media studies, cultural theory, and the digital, literary, and film cultures 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 diacritics, Configurations, Cultural Critique, Camera Obscura, and Postmodern Culture, for which I co-edited a special issue on the topic of "Medium and Mediation." A learned and thoughtful review of Dismantlings appears on the website of boundary 2. I recently described for the Cornell Press blog how digital culture is best discussed as a continuing episode in the long, interlinked histories of labor and war, race and gender, power and money. A few years ago, I was interviewed on the topic of critical cyberculture for our Digital Culture and Media Initiative.

Next up, two more books. The first of these, A Time for Sabotage: The Technological Society, Unfinished and Half in Ruin, theorizes and opposes the temporalities of technocentric neoimperialism and racist nationalism. The second, Megrim: A Media Theory of Migraine, theorizes migraine headache as a metaphor, method, and medium. In these and in other writing, I trace the convergent interests of activist and multiethnic literatures with radical philosophy and digital critique.