Independent Researcher

Independent Scholar and Writer

About

I have been interested in cultural studies, literary representations of technology and new media, and media theory since my undergraduate studies at The Johns Hopkins University, where my senior honors thesis focused on the relationship between Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow and William Gibson's Neuromancer. When I started grad school at Emory University "virtual reality" was the new buzzword, and I became interested in representing narrative in hypertexutal space after seeing a demonstration of Mosaic and the World Wide at a hypertext conference at UMBC in 1995. This led to my interest in information architecture and Web design, which found expression in the founding of a graduate student literary journal, alt.journal, and my eventual work as a technical writer and information designer in the technology industry. I've recently returned to the academic world after six years in that industry, and am currently interested in the intersection of systems theory, semiotics, cognitive science, cybernetics, and critical theory. My current research project, "nodalism," is an investigation into the history and use of the figure of the "node/network" in contemporary critical theory. On the literary side, I am continuing research into utopian literature and science-fiction that began when I was an undergraduate, while I am also generally interested in experimental literature and literature that interrogates itself as a representational medium.