Matt Tierney
Mailroom: 430 Burrowes Building
Mailroom: 430 Burrowes Building
Spring 2024 Office Hours
WTh 12:30-2Education
Professional Bio
I teach and write about digital and media cultures with reference to political histories and theories of technologism.
I've published two books—Dismantlings: 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 "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