Matt Tierney

Professional Bio

I teach and write literary and media studies with reference to humanist critiques of technology, imaginative conjunctures of art and politics, and cultural histories of the US Left.

I've published 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)—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 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. I wrote on the Cornell Press blog about how digital culture is best discussed as a continuing episode in the long duration of work and war, power and money.

Next up, more books, of which Sabotage Visions elaborates a postaesthetic idea of technology and survival, and Migraine-Work explores the mediatic capacities of migraine headache.

I teach graduate seminars like "Cultural Critique and High-Tech Capitalism," "Technoculture and Literary Politics," "Race, Gender, Medium," "Media/Culture," and "Reading Film"; while my undergraduate teaching ranges more widely, from human rights in digital society to science fiction, work and literature, community studies, and film poetics.