Professor, English

Alan Liu earned his Ph.D. from Stanford University and was previously on the faculty of Yale University’s English Department and British Studies Program. He served as chair of the UCSB English department for four years and also teaches in the Media Arts & Technology graduate program. He is the founder of a website for humanities research, Voice of the Shuttle, and began to study information culture as a way to close the circuit between the literary or historical imagination and the technological imagination. He has published Wordsworth: The Sense of History, The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information and Local Transcendence: Essays on Postmodern Historicism and the Database. Hefounded the NEH-funded Teaching with Technology project at UC Santa Barbara called Transcriptions: Literature and the Culture of Information, as well as his English Dept’s undergraduate specialization on Literature and the Culture of Information. He has served as a member of the Board of Directors of the Electronic Literature Organization and chair of the Technology/Software Committee of the organization’s Preservation / Archiving / Dissemination of Electronic Literature Initiative and worked on such initiatives as Transliteracies: Research in the Technological, Socail, and Cultural Practices of Online Reading, Research-oriented Social Environment, and 4Humanities. Liu is currently working on a series of philosophical and practical essays on media histories, the digital humanities, and their impact on the institutions and practices of the humanities. These will converge in two books, tentatively titled Media, History and Digital, Humanities.

Select EH Courses: Romantic Landscape and Cyberspace; Media Ecology; Textuality and New Media Ecologies, 1600-2000; Artificial Life; and Romantic Landscape