Paul Benzon is currently the Andrew Mellon Fellow and Associate Director of Media and Film Studies at Skidmore, where he teaches courses on topics including digital culture, hybrid genres, and media theory. His research combines interests in contemporary literature, cultural studies, and the history and theory of media ranging from the typewriters of the late nineteenth century to the networks and screens of the contemporary digital moment. He is often drawn in his work to moments of artistic experimentation and formal extremity—encyclopedism and textual overload, surplus and excess, remixes and reproductions, errors and deletions. Taking these aberrations as points of departure, he explores questions of textual materiality, the archive, and the aesthetics and politics of media change.

Paul’s recent research has focused on a wide and eclectic range of media phenomena, including tapes, libraries, trees, tanks, dust, black boxes, and robots. His work has appeared in Media-N (as part of a special issue he guest-edited on “The Aesthetics of Erasure”), electronic book review, CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, PMLA (where it won the William Riley Parker Prize for an Outstanding Article in 2010), Narrative (where it received the James Phelan Prize for the Best Contribution to Narrative in 2013), and Publishing as Artistic Practice (Sternberg Press, 2016), and is forthcoming in the Routledge Companion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities (2016, Routledge) and the Routledge Companion to Media Technology and Obsolescence (2018, Routledge). He is also currently at work on two book projects: one entitled Archival Fictions: Materiality, Form, and Media History in Contemporary Literature and one entitled A Partial History of Deletion: Absence, Obsolescence, and the Ends of Media.

http://paulbenzon.com/

https://twitter.com/pbenzon