Faculty Profile - Steven Nathaniel
Dr. Steven Nathaniel
he/him
Assistant Professor, School of Interdisciplinary Studies
Email: [email protected]
Office: LOH 109
Phone: 616-331-8224
Bio
My teaching and research examine the stories we tell about technology, as well as the way technology shapes our storytelling. Specifically, I study the intersections of technology and race in modernist literature and film. For example, I have written on the psychology of surveillance in African American biography, as well as on Zora Neale Hurston and biometric science. My work also draws on my past career in mechanical engineering, which has led me to publish on the concepts of efficiency, acoustics, and recording. Broadly, I am intrigued by the impetuously optimistic and precipitously pessimistic forms of imagination that mark technological revolutions.
In my current book project, Muting Modernism, I examine the role of silence in technoculture through readings of literature and film, between 1901 and 1938. I argue that thinkers from across the northern Atlantic disputed the power of rising technocracies in the communication, entertainment, and war industries. In the book, I theorize muting as a rebuke to mass information and a recuperation of the aesthetics of listening, as in John Keats's celebration of unheard melodies, for instance. This leads me to examine a range of aesthetic scenes, from the poetry of the First World War, to the films of Oscar Micheaux, to the writing spaces of the New Woman. Through the project I hope to project the work of silence during modernism onto contemporary life, where we strive to slow the social media torrent and bar the algorithms that listen in on our digital lives.
Areas of Interest
Twentieth-Century Transatlantic Literature,
Science and Technology Studies,
African American Literature and Culture,
Sound Studies,
Digital Humanities
Education
Ph.D., Indiana University, English Language and Literature, 2021
M.A., Eastern Illinois University, English Literature, 2015
B.A., University of Dayton, Mechanical Engineering, 2010
Publications
"Hearing Things: Gloria Naylor's 1996, Havana Syndrome, and the Acousmatic Fantasy," Surveillance & Society, 2026
"T.S. Eliot, Black Musicality, and the Inaudible Past," The Sound of the Past: Modernist Echoes and Incantation, Vernon Press, 2025
"Telegraphic Surveillance, Psychic Dislocation, and the Data of Black Biography,' Arizona Quarterly 80.1, 2024
"Zora Neale Hurston, Anthropometrist," Modern Fiction Studies 64.4, 2023
"'Wire with something in it from men to men': Robert Frost, the Rural Telephone Network, and the Poetics of Eavesdropping" Modernism/Modernity 30.3, 2023
"Rhythmic Impersonality: The Legacy of Modernist Racialism in Zadie Smith's Swing Time," Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 63.3, 2022