Literary Advisory Board (LAB)

Current LAB Members

Annie Abrahams

Philippe Bootz

Philippe Bootz is emeritus Professor at the University Paris 8, member of the research laboratory Paragraphe. He has been assistant Director of the Laboratory Paragraphe, President of the MIM (Laboratoire de musique et informatique de Marseille), President of the scientific board of the labex H2H (Laboratory of excellence) at Paris 8, member of the international relationship committee of Paris 8, in charge of international relations for the eur ArTeC, and he was a member of the ELO board of Directors from 2014 to 2016.  His research focuses on Digital Literature and digital semiotics. He has published more then 100 papers, organized and participated in many international conferences. He is currently working on digital literature preservation in a partnership with the French National Library (BnF).

As an author he has been programing animated and generative poetry since 1977. He was a cofounder and the editor of the digital review alire (1989-2009). He has founded with friends the French group of authors in digital poetry L.A.I.R.E. (1988) and the international group Transitoire Observable (2003). His works are regularly shown in several festivals and exhibitions.

Serge Bouchardon

Serge Bouchardon (http://www.utc.fr/~bouchard/) is Professor at the Université de technologie de Compiègne (Alliance Sorbonne Université, France), where he teaches interactive writing. His research focuses on digital creation, in particular digital literature. He is the author of La valeur heuristique de la littérature numérique (The Heuristic Value of Electronic Literature), Hermann, Paris, 2014,  http://www.costech.utc.fr/CahiersCOSTECH/spip.php?article27.
As an author (http://www.sergebouchardon.com/), he is particularly interested in the way the gestures specific to the Digital contribute to the construction of meaning. His creations have been exhibited in many venues in Europe, America, Africa and the Middle East. They have been selected in various online reviews (bleuOrange, Hyperrhiz, SpringGun, The New River). The creation Loss of Grasp (http://lossofgrasp.com/) won the New Media Writing Prize 2011 and has been published in the Electronic Literature Collection volume 4 (https://collection.eliterature.org/4/deprise).

Helen Burgess

Helen J. Burgess is Professor of English at NC State University, where she teaches in rhetoric and professional writing concentration and in the interdisciplinary Communication, Rhetoric and Digital Media PhD program. Her research areas include digital rhetorics, electronic literature, physical computing and text/textiles. She is author, coauthor and coeditor of many scholarly works in print, DVD-Rom, iPad, and open-access online formats, as well as creative works in physical installation format. She is editor of Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures. See samples of her work at https://polyrhetor.io/cv.html

Roderick Coover

Carolina Gainza

Monika Górska-Olesińska

Amira Hanafi

N. Katherine Hayles

N. Katherine Hayles, the James B. Duke Professor of Literature Emerita at
Duke University and Distinguished Research Professor of English at the University
of California, Los Angles, teaches and writes on the relations of literature, science
and technology in the 20th and 21st centuries. She has published ten books and over
100 peer-reviewed articles, and she is a member of the American Academy of Arts
and Sciences. Her most recent books are Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive
Nonconscious (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), and Postprint: Books and
Becoming Computational (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021).

Deena Larsen

Patrick Lichty

Patrick Lichty is an artist, writer, curator and Assistant Professor at Winona State University in Creative Digital Media, who explores the impact that art and technology have upon society, aesthetics, and how we translate reality through technological media.  He has an MFA in Digital Art from Bowling Green University, and Iranian artist Negin Ehtesabian and he formed the team of NPT who do work concerning human rights and intercultural exchange. He works extensively in the area of electronic writing, and won an Honorable Mention at Ars Electronica for his essay on art and intellectual Property, “Grasping @ Bits,” and created an open/WIKI/reference – driven essay, “Art in the Age of Dataflow,” which was a commissioned work by Turbulence.org. As with much electronic writing, the dynamic versions of these works no longer function, and static versions are in his book published by the Institute for Networked Culture, entitled Variant Analyses: Interrogations of Digital Culture. He was a writer and animator for the activist collectives, RTMark and the Yes Men, and a Principal for the Second Life performance group, Second Front.

Souvik Moukerjee

Stuart Moulthrop

Stuart Moulthrop is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His research areas include electronic literature, computer game studies, and other aspects of digital culture. He has co-written two books, with Dene Grigar: Traversals: The Uses of Preservation for Early Electronic Literature (MIT Press, 2017) and with Anastasia Salter: Twining: Critical and Creative Perspectives on Hypertext Narratives (Amherst College Press, 2021). Moulthrop is also the author of 20 works of digital fiction and art, from the diskette-based Victory Garden in 1991 to the web-based Victory Garden 2022. Several of these works have won awards and mention among the “golden age” of digital fiction.

Jeneen Naji

Marisa Parham

Mariusz Pisarski

Mariusz Pisarski is Assistant Professor at the University of Information Technology and Management in Rzeszow. He is also the founder of Techsty – Polish journal on e-literature; translator, producer and academic teacher. Among his linguistic translations are works of Judy Malloy, Michael Joyce, Stephanie Strickland and Nick Montfort, Michael Joyce. His research focuses on poetic, semiotic and performative aspects of electronic literature. He is also the secretary of a newly created Center for Electronic Literature Research at Adam Mickiewicz University and Poznań, Poland. As a research affiliate at the ELL Lab at Washington State University Vancouver he has learned a lot about the NEXT and its methodologies of preservation. His own experience in media translation contributed to the recent publication of the Web edition of Michael Joyce’s Twilight. A Symphony (2022) with a full translation of Storyspace maps and the guard field system into the Web environment.

Søren Pold

Søren Bro Pold is PhD and Associate Professor at Aarhus University, Denmark. He has published on the arts of the interface in its various forms, e.g. on electronic literature, net art, software art, creative software, urban interfaces and digital culture. In relation to these research fields, he has been active in establishing interface criticism as a research perspective, which discusses the role and the development of the interface for art, aesthetics, culture and IT. Latest book is The Metainterface – The Art of Platforms, Cities and Clouds with Christian Ulrik Andersen.

Manuel Portela

Manuel Portela is Professor of Anglo-American Studies and Coordinator of the PhD Programme in Materialities of Literature at the University of Coimbra. His research addresses writing and reading media and how they impact on literary forms and practices. The most significant results of his work can be seen in Scripting Reading Motions: The Codex and the Computer as Self-Reflexive Machines (The MIT Press, 2013), LdoD Archive: Collaborative Digital Archive of the Book of Disquiet (2017-2022; https://ldod.uc.pt/), co-edited by António Rito Silva, and Literary Simulation and the Digital Humanities: Reading, Editing, Writing (Bloomsbury, 2022). He collaborates in the “PO-EX Digital Archive: Portuguese Experimental Literature” (https://po-ex.net/). He has translated many English-language authors, including works by Laurence Sterne, William Blake, and Samuel Beckett. In 1998 he received the National Award for Literary Translation for the Portuguese translation of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (2 vols., 1997-98; 2nd ed. 2014).

Alexandra Saemmer

Alexandra Saemmer is Professor in Information and Communication Studies and Semiotics at the University of Paris 8, France and acting co-director of the CEMTI lab (Center of research on media, technologies and internationalization). Her book Matières textuelles sur support numérique was among the first to be entirely dedicated to digital literature in France. Since the 2000s, she has been analysing the poetic tropes behind the form of hypermedia rhetoric. After the publication of her book Rhétorique du texte numérique (2014), she launched a research project on augmented artbooks. In her 39 articles and 41 book chapters, she furthermore explores experimental narratives in social networks such as Facebook, and more generally, the complex relationship of submission and appropriation, of quenched inspiration, of consensual exploitation and accepted governmentality that structures the dialogue between the human author and the industrial software tool. Looking forwards, she is interested in exploring the intertwining of the construction of meaning by the human mind and the current technologies of machine learning, reflecting with colleagues in computer science on the possibilities to introduce the social aspects of sense-making in IA models.

Alexandra Saemmer is the author or co-author of novel-length works of electronic literature such as Nouvelles de la Colonie (on Facebook ; a remediated version for paper and screen has been published in 2022 by the French editor publie.net), Böhmische Dörfer (part of the Eletronic Literature Collection vol. 3), Tramway (part of the Anthology of European Eletronic Literature).

Alckmar Luiz dos Santos

Lyle Skains

Lyle Skains researches and teaches Creative Digital Writing and Science Communication, conducting practice-based research into writing, reading/playing, publishing digital and transmedia narratives, and how these can be used for health and science communication. Her recent digital fiction includes No World 4 Tomorrow for the You & CO₂ project, and Only, Always, Never for the Infectious Storytelling project; both works were designed to effect social change. She is the founder of Wonderbox Digital, a marketplace for digital fiction, aiming to explore innovations in digital and online publishing and creativity; the director of the New Media Writing Prize; and an editor on the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 4. Her digital fiction can be found at lyleskains.com; articles in Convergence, Digital Creativity, and Computers and Composition; and books with Cambridge UP (Digital Authorship), Emerald (Digital Narrative for SciComm) and Bloomsbury (The Popular Emergence of Digital Fiction, Jan 2023). She is currently a Principal Academic in Health and Science Communication at Bournemouth University.

Winnie Soon

Winnie Soon is an artistic coder and researcher interested in queering the intersections of art and technology, engaging with topics like queer code and coding, digital censorship, experimental diagramming and software publishing. With works appearing in museums, galleries, festivals, distributed networks, papers and books, they are the author of two books titled “Aesthetic Programming: A Handbook of Software Studies” (with Geoff Cox) and “Fix My Code” (with Cornelia Sollfrank). Winnie is the co-initiator of the art community Code & Share [ ] and the co-editor of the Software Studies Book Series (MIT Press). They are currently working as Associate Professor at Aarhus University and visiting researcher at the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image (CSNI), London South Bank University. More: www.siusoon.net

Rob Wittig

Rob Wittig plays at the crossroads of literature, graphic design and digital culture. A Silicon Valley native, he co-founded the legendary IN.S.OMNIA electronic bulletin board with the Surrealist-style literary and art group Invisible Seattle — a ground-breaking online art project of the digital age. On the basis of this work, Rob received a Fulbright grant to study the writing and graphic design of electronic literature with French philosopher Jacques Derrida in Paris. Rob’s book based on that work, “Invisible Rendezvous,” was published Wesleyan University Press. He then embarked on a series of illustrated and designed digital fictions, including “Blue Company” a subscription novel in e-mail, “Friday’s Big Meeting” a fictional chatroom with emotive photo-avatars, and “El Dorado,” a horizontally scrolling travelogue (as part of an international collaboration with writers from Hamburg, Germany). Alongside his creative projects, Rob has worked in major publishing and graphic design firms in Chicago, rising to positions of creative direction and leadership of R&D teams. Rob’s web fiction “Fall of the Site of Marsha” was among the first works of electronic literature to be archived in the Library of Congress. In 2011 Rob earned an MA in Digital Culture (equivalent to a US MFA) at the University of Bergen, Norway, completing two major electronic literature projects: “Chicago Soul Exchange” and “Grace, Wit & Charm.” He taught for years in the Art & Design and English, Linguistics and Writing Studies departments at the University of Minnesota Duluth. His recent work — netprov — has been in the form of creating and facilitating large-participation, creative collaborations in contemporary platforms. His book Netprov: Networked Improvised Literature for the Classroom and Beyond appeared in Fall 0f 2021 from Amherst College Press. The book is available for free in open access.

Legacy Members

• Espen Aarseth
• Mark Amerika
• Kurt Andersen
• Robert Arellano
• Richard Bangs
• John Barth
• Jay David Bolter
• T.C. Boyle
• Laura Borràs i Castanyer
• Robert Coover
• Jane Yellowlees Douglas
• Morgan Entrekin
• Edward Falco
• Loss Pequeño Glazier
• Chris Funkhouser
• Carolyn Guyer
• Robert Kendall
• Matthew G. Kirschenbaum
• Raine Koskimaa
• George Landow
• Jennifer Ley
• Nancy Lin
• Erik Loyer
• Judy Malloy
• Harry Mathews
• Larry McCaffery
• Jerome McGann
• Heather McHugh
• Nick Montfort
• Judd Morrissey
• Robert Polito
• Jill Walker Rettberg
• Scott Rettberg
• Jim Rosenberg
• Joanna Scott
• Alan Sondheim
• Nan A. Talese
• Takayuki Tatsumi
• Sue Thomas
• Susana Pajares Tosca