Richard A. Grusin

Richard Grusin is Professor of English and Director of the Center for 21st Century Studies at the University of Wisonsin-Milwaukee. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1983. He has published numerous chapters and articles and written four books. The first, Transcendentalist Hermeneutics: Institutional Authority and the Higher Criticism of the Bible (Duke, 1991), concerns the influence of European (primarily German) theories of biblical interpretation on the New England Transcendentalists. His more recent work concerns historical, cultural, and aesthetic aspects of technologies of visual representation. With Jay David Bolter he is the author of Remediation: Understanding New Media (MIT, 1999), which sketches out a genealogy of new media, beginning with the contradictory visual logics underlying contemporary digital media. Culture, Technology, and the Creation of America's National Parks (Cambridge, 2004), focuses on the problematics of visual representation involved in the founding of America's national parks. His fourth book, Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11 (Palgrave, 2010), argues that in an era of heightened securitization, socially networked US and global media work to pre-mediate collective affects of anticipation and connectivity, while also perpetuating low levels of apprehension or fear.