Faculty in Media and Digital Studies teach graduate seminars on topics in the cultural history and theory of computation; digital writing; media theory; platform, software, and code studies; rhetorics and technologies; and technoculture studies, among other areas.
The Department of English is home to the Digital Culture and Media Initiative, which since 2014 has sponsored a series of presentations, conversations, and interviews with critics and scholars invited to visit Penn State. Recent visitors have presented research on the cultural dimensions of cyberwarfare; race, robotics, and labor; feminist ethics in the digital age; the history and politics of computational formalism in cultural analysis; race, gender, sexuality, and labor in games and gamer culture; the role of open standards in the history of the internet; and the ethnographic origins of modern media.
The Department of English is also home to the Penn State Digital English Studio, which helps teachers, researchers, and academic programs realize a variety of digital media projects.
Some Recent Graduate Seminars
Cultural Critique and High-Tech Capitalism
Platform, Software, and Code Studies
Mass Culture Machines
Rhetorics of Artificial Intelligence
Studies in Rhetoric: Technical, Professional, and Digital Writing: A Survey
AI and English Studies: Practices, Paradigms, Genealogies
Graduate Faculty
Cultural history, political economy, and philosophy of machine translation and artificial intelligence; cultural history, political economy, and philosophy of computing; philosophy of technology more broadly; platform, software, and code studies; programming languages and cultures of software development; media theory
Cultural consequences of technicism; mediations of social change; intermediality and mediatedness; political economy and accountability in the automation age
Graduate Students
Electronic literature, video game studies, computer programming
