Tess McNulty
Tess McNulty is a PhD candidate at Harvard, working in the areas of contemporary literature, digital culture, and the digital humanities. Her dissertation project, "Content Culture: Literature in the Age of Viral Media" examines how literary writers are responding to the emergence of viral “content”: short, digital ephemera designed for rapid circulation on social media, like listicles, how-to-videos, or hot takes. Pairing prominent groupings of English-language authors—like New Sincerity writers, black radical poets, or graphic novelists—with the popular, but often as-yet-uncategorized content genres to which their work responds—like the uplifting anecdote, iWitness account, or depressive comic—the project argues that (much) contemporary literature draws uneasy inspiration from content. To do so, it engages in both “close” and “distant” (or computational) analysis of both content and literature. Tess's peer-reviewed, academic work has appeared in Post45, Cultural Analytics, and New Literary History, among other venues. She also writes book reviews, essays, and journalism, for venues like The Point and Public Books. Before coming to Harvard, she earned an M.St. from Oxford in Post-1900 Literature and a B.A. from Yale in English and Philosophy.