Justin Tackett

Postdoctoral Scholar, Department of English, Stanford University

2019 to 2020
Albert M. Greenfield Research Fellow

Poetry and Sound Technology, 1816-1914; Hardy and Radio; Poetics and the Prehistory of Silent Film, c.1880-c.1930

In my work, I show how British and American literary (particularly poetic) practices of the long nineteenth century impacted technological development, how literature helped familiarize new technologies, and how literature informs our ongoing engagements with technology. To tell this history, I embrace a full range of early technologies of transmission, transcription, replication, and amplification. The result is a reorientation towards the history of technology that takes into account the literary forces that shaped its trajectory.