Kate Marshall

Biography

I am a teacher and scholar of twentieth- and twenty-first century media, literature, and communications systems. I have a background in technology journalism, and my earliest work deals with the temporalities of 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 by looking at how communication is figured in the making-visible of infrastructure.

My second book, Novels by Aliens: Weird Tales and the Twenty-First Century (forthcoming University of Chicago Press, 2023), looks back on two decades of twenty-first century cultural production to account for the rise of genre hybridity in literary fiction. I explore the convergence of desires for nonhuman narration in theory and in fiction—in new materialist fantasies of object agency and in the surprisingly weird interruptions of literary realism—to account for genre’s appeal across cultural forms in these decades.

I serve on the faculty of the History and Philosophy of Science, and am a member of the steering committee for the Moreau College Initiative, a transformative prison education program. I am also on the faculty of the Bread Loaf School of English, and co-edit the Post45 book series at Stanford UP.