I am a Teaching Track Assistant Professor of English in the Department of Arts and Communication at Florida Tech. My research interests include 20th and 21st century literature, theories of world literature and cultural production, literary sociology, translation studies, print culture, media studies, and book history.
Actors, Institutions, Networks
My book, Actors, Institutions, Networks: Recovering Agency in World Literary Circulation in the 20th and 21st Centuries is forthcoming in December 2024 with University of Massachusetts Press as part of the Page and Screen series.
Actors, Institutions, Networks argues that network theory can effectively model the agency of actors and institutions in the literary field, making visible both the long-term accrual of power, as well as the agency of authors, translators, editors, and readers who do not simply replicate the values of a global literary marketplace, but divert, question, and undermine them. In order to do this, the book closely examines the paratexts and archival documents surrounding moments of global circulation in and through institutions like U.S. world literature anthologies, the Council of Books in Wartime, the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, Oprah’s Book Club, and Amazon’s translation imprint.
Selling Books with Algorithms
Selling Books with Algorithms, is under contract with Cambridge University Press as part of the Cambridge Elements in Publishing and Book Culture Series.
Bookselling has traditionally been a job focused on acts of curation and recommendation. Online bookselling has, in theory, done away with the need to curate by granting consumers access to seemingly limitless troves of inventory. Yet access to this vast inventory is highly mediated through various search and recommendation algorithms, which have replaced the traditional role of an empathetic and knowledgeable bookseller. Primarily focused on the case of Amazon.com, the single largest bookseller in the U.S., this element combines insights from software studies, social science, cultural studies, and book history in order to consider the role of algorithms in 21st century bookselling. Key themes that emerge in this element are the role of accountability and human agency in the enactment of bookselling with recommendation algorithms, as well as the elusive promise of algorithmic intersubjectivity.
Anna Muenchrath 