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.
Recent Graduate Courses
- Digital Writing (Stuart Selber)
- Historicizing “Digital Humanities” (Brian Lennon)
- Media Theory and Modernity (Brian Lennon)
- Race, Gender, Medium (Matt Tierney)
- Rhetorics and Technologies (Stuart Selber)
- Platform, Software, and Code Studies (Brian Lennon)
- Technoculture and Literary Politics (Matt Tierney)
Graduate Faculty
Cultural history and political economy of computing; platform, software, and code studies; programming languages and cultures of software development
Cultural consequences of technologism; mediations of social change; intermediality and mediatedness; political economy and accountability in the automation age
Graduate Students
Social media book cultures, reading & technology, ontologies of the digital