Overview
Anna Shechtman is an Assistant Professor of Literatures in English, specializing in media studies and American literature. She is writing a two-volume history of the “media” and “data” concepts in the United States. The first examines the social formations and technologies of production that have allowed "media" to incorporate—and perhaps even supersede—the categories of "art," "literature," "communication," and "culture" in the second half of the 20th century. The second challenges the notion that “data” has always been the proprietary domain of social scientists, improperly imported into the study of literature and history by digital humanists.
Her research has been published in Critical Inquiry, Representations, and nonsite.org, among other journals. Her freelance essays and reviews have appeared in many outlets, including ArtForum, the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, the Yale Review, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, where she is an editor-at-large. She writes monthly crossword puzzles for the New Yorker, and her first book, The Riddles of the Sphinx: Inheriting the Feminist History of the Crossword Puzzle was published by HarperOne in 2024.
Research Focus
- Media Studies
- Literary Theory
- Film Theory
- 20th and 21st Century American Literature
- 20th and 21st Century African American Literature