Faculty & Staff

Laura Shackelford
Assistant Professor
2116 Liberal Arts
Phone: (585) 475-2461
Email: lxsgla@rit.edu

Ph.D. in English with specializations in Twentieth and Twenty-first century American literatures, Digital Poetics, and Science and Literature. Indiana University, Bloomington.
B.A. in English. University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.

Research

My research examines and exploits the comparative perspective literary texts, in print or digital media, provide on digital cultures. I study literary encounters with digital cultures in a variety of media - print fiction, electronic literatures, digital games, graphic novels, and film.  I'm particularly interested in how such experimental, cross-media literary and artistic practices register and creatively and critically reflect on contemporary digital cultures, information and systems sciences, and computation-based technologies in the U.S.

My book, Tactics of the Human: Experimental Technics in American Fiction, returns to fiction published in the midst of the supposed 'digital revolution' from 1991-2002 that reflects on digital cultures by literally incorporating digital modes of expression and spatial forms (such as the hyperlink, or social network) into the print medium or reconsidering print literary practices by transposing them into a digital hypertext fiction. The book reflects on the comparative view literary texts such as John Barth's "Click," Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl; or a Modern Monster, and Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex provide on emerging digital cultures and, in particular, their efforts to think through the potential impact of digital cultures (and the post-war cybernetics, information, and systems sciences on which they draw), on previous, print-based understandings of sex, gender, identity, race, sexuality, nation, and the human. I argue that their comparative media practices point us towards important new ways that the literary participates in digital cultures.

Recent work includes an essay, "Migrating Modalities of Expression;" or Mode-Play in Electronic Poetry as Another Kind of Language," on Maria Mencia's electronic poetry, which experiments with multisensory or multimodal expression using text, moving text, sound, color, interactive elements, and video, capabilities that are unique to the digital medium, but also have ties to earlier poetic traditions such as concrete poetry. 

Teaching

In direct and lively relation to my research, my current teaching repetoire includes courses in:

Narrative Moves: Storytelling in and Across Media; The Novel: Its Past and Futures; Science Fiction: Biopolitics; Topics in Women's & Gender Studies.

This spring, I'll pilot a new course I've designed on Text & Code that will examine the combinations of text and code that underlie emerging creative textual practices in electronic literatures, mobile communication, digital games, geospatial mapping, interactive and locative media, and augmented reality. Reflecting on the strategies we need to "read" such texts, the course will also consider the social, cultural, creative, and legal significance of these new kinds of creative textual practices.

SELECTED RECENT PUBLICATIONS AND PRESENTATIONS

Tactics of the Human: Experimental Technics in American Fiction. Book manuscript forthcoming from University of Michigan Press.

“The Monstrosity of Media in Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl and other Posthumanist Critiques of the Instrumental.” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, issue 63, vol. 21, no. 3 (Winter 2006): 62-101.

“Counter-Networks in a Network Society: Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead.” Postmodern Culture, issue 16.3 (May 2006).
   
“Narrative Subjects Meet their Limits: John Barth’s ‘Click’ and the Remediation of Hypertext.” Contemporary Literature 46.2 (2005): 275-310.