User:Alan Liu
From English 194 Wiki Site
Biography
Alan Liu is 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 extended the methodological work of this book by exploring 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 to study information culture as a way to close the circuit between his interest in the fate of historical imagination and his parallel interest in technology. (He is the descendent of immigrant engineers, a lifelong reader of science fiction, and an early adopter of computing technology who in 1983 purchased his first IBM PC, worth at that time half his assistant professor's salary.) What is the relation between the imaginative experience of history and that of apparently instantaneous, history-less information culture? In 2004, Liu 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. He is also a member of the Board of Directors of the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO)</a> and chair of the Technology/Software Committee of the ELO’s PAD Initiative] (Preservation / Archiving / Dissemination of Electronic Literature). Most recently, he started the interdisciplinary research project titled Transliteracies: Research in the Technological, Social, and Cultural Practices of Online Reading Liu is the instructor of English 194. (See his home page).
Work Log
00:43, 27 May 2006 (PDT):
- Spent a few hours tonight tinkering with the CSS in the navigation sidebar to try to separate the links to content pages visually form the links to developer and course pages.
