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
online communities, open collaborations, online knowledge construction/circulation
Cultural history and political economy of computing; platform, software, and code studies; programming languages and cultures of software development
Technical Communication, computers and composition, human-computer interaction
Histories of technologism, mediations of social change, intermediality, high-tech capitalism
Graduate Students
Technical Communication, Digital Rhetoric, Networked Communication Environments, Histories and Philosophies of Technology