Anna Shechtman

Anna Shechtman is a Klarman Fellow at Cornell University and will begin as an assistant professor in the Department of Literatures in English in 2024. She is writing a two-volume history of the “media” and “data” concepts in the United States. The first book builds upon her dissertation, The Media Concept: A Genealogy, which demonstrates that the imperial spread of the media concept has imperiled the very values it was initially employed to defend. The second, Data: A Humanistic Inquiry, challenges the notion that “data” has always been the proprietary domain of social scientists, improperly imported into the study of literature and history by so-called digital humanists. Her first book The Riddles of the Sphinx, about the history of the crossword puzzle and the sexual politics of wordplay, will be published by HarperOne in March. Her freelance essays and reviews have appeared in ArtForum, The New Inquiry, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Slate, The Yale Review, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, where she is an editor-at-large.