Brian Lennon

Professor of English and Comparative Literature

Preferred Pronouns: he, him, his

416 Burrowes Building

blennon@psu.edu

OLD PROFILE HERE

Education

Ph.D., Columbia University (2005)

M.F.A., University of Iowa (1999)

B.A., Wesleyan University (1993)

Websites

http://bitfragment.net

Professional Bio

I am the author of three monographs: Programming Language Cultures: Automating Automation, a study of programming languages and cultures of software development (Stanford University Press, 2024), Passwords: Philology, Security, Authentication (Harvard University Press, 2018), a critical history of literary data processing, and In Babel's Shadow: Multilingual Literatures, Monolingual States (University of Minnesota Press, 2010), a study of literary multilingualism in print culture.

At Penn State, I was the first faculty director (2014–2021) of the Digital Culture and Media Initiative, a project of the Department of English in the College of the Liberal Arts. My teaching includes undergraduate and graduate courses in new media and digital studies. Recent graduate seminars include "Media Theory and Modernity," "Historicizing 'Digital Humanities'," and "Platform, Software and Code Studies." Other undergraduate and graduate teaching has included courses in the theory of the essay, the literary fragment, U.S. nonfiction prose, and literatures of migration and displacement.