Teaching Assistant Professor / Associate Director of Digital Literacy and Communications Lab
2021, PhD Literary and Cultural Studies, Carnegie Mellon University
Bio
Steven Gotzler is a Teaching Assistant Professor in the Department of English & Comparative Literature. His research explores the intersections of work discourse, intellectual culture, and critical theories of race, gender, and the environment. He has related interests in the digital humanities and critical game studies.
He is currently at work on his first book project entitled Working Models: Postwar Fiction, Intellectual Work, and the Resources of Cultural Studies. This project brings together readings in the working-class novel with case studies of postwar intellectual cultures—in Black radicalism, socialist feminism, and ecology—to examine how postwar writers leveraged literary form to tell stories about work whose narratives of domestic discontent, racial estrangement, and environmental knowing model the practical challenges faced by intellectuals laboring within movements for women’s liberation, anti-racism, and environmentalism.
His DH work emphasizes minimal computing principles for projects in web publishing and data curation. Most recently, he developed and co-edited MARXdown—a collection of online reading editions conceived as a resource for readers of Marx’s most important but also most challenging text, Capital Vol.1. MARXdown prioritizes principles of durability, accessibility, and sustainability to address the unique constraints posed by the community reading group environment.
His interest in gaming considers the rhetorical affordances of games as cultural objects, and as a medium for building cultural knowledge. He is co-host of Subject Matter: Table Top a podcast about board games and the subject matter that animates them. This podcast explores the world of tabletop games by sitting down to play them with people who possess a deep understanding of the various themes, settings, systems, or content that we encounter in them. In the process, it discusses how games communicate their subject matter, and how they can influence players’ feelings about each other, and the world that they inhabit.
To read more, visit my websitePublications:
“The New Cinema of Surplus: Partial Lumpenization and the Reserve Army of Labor in Contemporary Global Cinema,” contribution to The Idea of the Lumpenproletariat, edited by Ben Clarke and Michael Bailey (forthcoming, 2023)
“Abolitionist Pedagogies, Pedagogical Labor: A Critical Dialogue in Ethnic Studies Review” co-authored with Vineeta Singh and Roopika Risam (forthcoming, 2022)
“1956: The British New Left and the “big-bang” theory of Cultural Studies.” Lateral: The Journal of the Cultural Studies Association, 8.2, Fall 2019
“Speaking of the Working Class – On Richard Hoggart.” The Los Angeles Review of Books, 25 Apr. 2018.
Courses Taught:
(ENGL 105) English Composition & Rhetoric
(ENGL 148) Horror Fiction
(ENGL 257) Video Games and Narrative Cinema
(ENGL 258) Games and Literature