Avery Slater

Avery Slater’s teaching focuses on twentieth- and twenty-first century literature in a global context. Her research investigates the re-conceptualization of human and nonhuman forms of language following the rise of information and computational technologies, with specific attention to the history of artificial intelligence and machine learning. Her book project Apparatus Poetics explores how mid-twentieth-century poets revise and reinvent modernist theories of poetic process in response to emerging technologies of language (computation, artificial intelligence, machine translation, information theory). She spent the academic year of 2016-2017 at the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Humanities Forum, researching the literary and philosophical contexts of postwar machine translation. She has also held fellowships from the Society for the Humanities (Cornell) and the University of Texas at Austin. Her work has appeared in New Literary History, IEEE, Symplokē, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Cultural Critique, American Literature, Transformations: Journal of Media, Culture, and Technology, Amodern, and in edited collections Saturation: An Elemental Politics (Duke UP), The Oxford Handbook of Ethics of AI (Oxford UP), A Companion to American Poetry (Wiley-Blackwell), Trauma and Literature in an Age of Globalization (Routledge), and The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science. Avery Slater is a research lead at the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society at the University of Toronto. She also serves on the Executive Committee of the MLA’s TC Forum for the Digital Humanities and is a member of the editorial board for the Brill series “Studies in the Lyric.”