Jessica Pressman on The Future of Digital Literature

Digital literature scholar Jessica Pressman will speak on the future of literary studies in an upcoming lecture at Coe College. The event will be held on Thursday, Feb.21 at 4 p.m. in Kesler Lecture Hall of Hickok Hall. Entitled “Electronic Literature: Literary Studies in the 21st Century,” the presentation is free and open to the public. In her lecture, Pressman will share her work on literature and how the digital age has changed the future of it. Her book, “Digital Modernism: Making it in the New Media,” describes how changes in technology are shaping the ways in which we read, study and engage with print and electronic literature. Currently, Pressman researches and teaches 20th and 21st century experimental American literature, digital literature and media theory. She is a Fellow with the American Council of Learned Societies and a Visiting Scholar in the Literature Department at the University of California – San Diego. She has served as assistant professor of English at Yale University and received her Ph.D. in English from UCLA in 2007. Pressman has earned awards for her work as an educator and writer. She received the Sarai Ribicoff Teaching Excellence Award from Yale College in 2010. More recently, she earned the Morse Fellowship Research Sabbatical from Yale University to complete research on her second book. The author’s other works include “Close Reading Electronic Literature, a Collaborative Case Study of William Poundstone’s ‘Project for the Tachistoscope: [Bottomless Pit],’” co-written with Mark C. Marino and Jeremy Douglass, and “New Paradigms for the Humanities: Comparative Textual Medium,” co-edited with N. Katherine Hayles. Pressman is currently working on a manuscript that examines the fetishization of the book object in 21st century print and digital literary culture. Pressman is articles editor for “Digital Humanities Quarterly,” president of the MLA Media & Literature Executive Committee, a member of the board of directors at the Electronic Literature Organization, and a board member for the online journal of digital art Dichtung-Digital. For more information, call 399-8581 or visit coe.edu.