Dennis Tenen

Dennis Yi Tenen is an associate professor of English at Columbia University, where he also co-directs the Center for Comparative Media. His research happens at the intersection of people, text, and technology. A long-time affiliate of Columbia’s Data Science Institute, formerly a Microsoft engineer in the Windows group and fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, his code runs on millions of personal computers worldwide.

Tenen received his doctorate in Comparative Literature at Harvard University under the advisement of Elaine Scarry and William Todd. The founder of Columbia’s Literary Modeling and Visualization Lab, he co-edits the On Method book series at Columbia University Press. His published work can be found in monographs including Plain Text: The Poetics of Computation (Stanford University Press, 2017), Literary Theory for Robots (W.W. Norton, 2024) and Author Function under contract with Chicago UP. His recent articles appear on the pages of Modern Philology, New Literary History, Amodern, boundary2, Computational Culture, and Modernism/modernity on topics that span literary theory, the sociology of literature, media history, and computational narratology. (2024)

Publications

• Plain Text: The Poetics of Computation, Stanford University Press, 2017, 280 pp.

• "The Emergence of American Formalism", Modern Philology 117:2, Nov 2019, pp 257-283. [1]

• Literary Theory for Robots: How Computers Learned to Write, W. W. Norton, 2024, 176 pp. Publisher.

• more

Links

• Website
• Profile on Columbia U
• Twitter
• Github
• StackExchange