Alan Liu

Alan Liu is Chair and Professor in the English Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara; and previously a faculty member in the English Department and British Studies Program at Yale University. He began his research career in the field of British romantic literature and art, where his first book on Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford Univ. Press, 1989) explored the relation between the imaginative experiences of literature and history. In a series of theoretical essays in the 1990s, he explored cultural criticism, the “new historicism,” and postmodernism in contemporary literary studies. In 1994, when he started his Voice of the Shuttle Web site for humanities research, he began What is the relation between the seduction of literature and information?to study information culture as a way to close the circuit between the problems of the literary or historical imagination and the technological imagination. In 2004, he published his The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information (Univ. of Chicago Press). Also forthcoming from Univ. of Chicago Press is Local Transcendence: Essays on Postmodern Historicism and the Database. Liu is principal investigator of the NEH-funded Teaching with Technology project at UC Santa Barbara entitled Transcriptions: Literature and the Culture of Information, and co-director of the English Dept’s undergraduate specialization on Literature and the Culture of Information. From 2002-2007 he was a member of the Board of Directors of the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) and chair of the Technology/Software Committee of the ELO’s PAD Initiative (Preservation / Archiving / Dissemination of Electronic Literature). In 2005, he started the University of California multi-campus research group: Transliteracies: Research in the Technological, Social, and Cultural Practices of Online Reading.