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Kate Marshall

Kate Marshall Preferred

Associate Professor

Specialty: 20th- and 21st-Century American Literature, Media and Technology, Critical Theory

Degree: PhD, UCLA

I am a teacher and scholar of twentieth- and twenty-first century media and communications systems. I have a background in technology journalism, and my earliest work deals with the temporalities of contemporary American fiction that engaged with those being produced by new technologies and scientific epistemologies. In my first book, Corridor: Media Architectures in American Fiction (2013), I discuss literature’s mediality by way of its communication systems, and more precisely, by looking at how communication is figured in the making-visible of infrastructure. 

Since the publication of Corridor I have worked on several projects dedicated to the entwined understanding of narrative and medial form. My second book, A Poetics of the Outside: Exteriority, Mediation, and Twenty-First Century Narrative (under contract), is a study of nonhuman narration and the desire for the outside that moves between contemporary literature and critical thought. Unlike the central claims of North American nonhuman theory, new materialisms, or the broadly understood posthumanities, which are informed by the biological sciences, my method in A Poetics of the Outside develops out of the media theoretical approach to cultural techniques. I have also been working on a third book, a study of the novella that intervenes in studies of contemporary attention, technology, and reading practices by attending to fiction’s least-understood form.

I teach media, technology, and contemporary thought in a variety of contexts, ranging from transhistorical encounters with genre to graduate writing workshops dedicated to work in the public humanities. I serve on the faculty of the History and Philosophy of Science at Notre Dame, and am a member of the steering committee for the Moreau College Initiative, a transformative prison education program run in partnership with Holy Cross College. I am also on the faculty of the Bread Loaf School of English, teaching at the Vermont mountain campus. In addition to lecturing extensively in the U.S. and abroad, I co-edit the Post45 book series at Stanford University Press and serve on the steering committee of the Post45 Collective.
 

Recent Publications

  • Corridor: Media Architectures in American Fiction (University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
  • “The Novella as Technology: A Media Story.” Ex-position (2020).
  • “The Ends of Speculative Horror.” Modern Language Studies (2020).
  • “Having an Orange Soda with Sam.” Los Angeles Review of Books (2020).
  • “The Readers of the Future Have Become Shitty Literary Critics” boundary2 online, (2018).
  • “New Wave Fabulism and Hybrid Science Fictions.” American Literature in Transition: 2000-2010, ed. Rachel Greenwald Smith. (Cambridge UP, 2017).
  • “The Old Weird.” Modernism/Modernity (2016).
  • “Atlas of a Concave World: Game of Thrones and the Historical Novel.” Critical Quarterly (2015).
  • “What Are the Novels of the Anthropocene? American Fiction in Geological Time.” American Literary History (2015).
  • Editor, with Tobias Boes, “Writing the Anthropocene.” Special issue of the minnesota review (2104).
  • “Dreiser’s Stamping Room: Becoming Media in An American Tragedy” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 46.2 (2013).

Recent Honors / Awards

  • Frank and Eleanor Griffiths Chair, Bread Loaf School of English, 2019
  • Founders’ Fellow, National Humanities Center (2016-2017)
  • Dorothy Lee Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Culture, awarded to Corridor: Media Architectures in American Fiction by the Media Ecology Association, 2014
  • Thyssen Foundation Grant, 2011 (with Markus Krajewski and Stephan Trüby, “Dienstbarkeitsarchitekturen”)
  • Faculty Fellow, DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst) Interdisciplinary Summer Seminar, University of Chicago, 2009

 

Contact
218 Decio Faculty Hall
(574) 631-4125
kmarshall@nd.edu

 

Postal address
Department of English
233 Decio Hall
Notre Dame, IN 46556