Matthew G. Kirschenbaum

I'm a professor in the English department at the University of Maryland, just outside of Washington DC. I research the history of writing and computers and the wondrous and messy interactions between them. My first book, Mechanisms (MIT Press), was written for an academic audience. My newest book, Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing (Harvard UP/Belknap), is aimed at a broader general interest audience. It began, as many books do, with a question I honestly couldn't answer for myself: What was the first novel written with a word processor?

A lifelong interest in gaming and simulation led to another recent project, Zones of Control (MIT Press), a mammoth compendium of essays about the oldest kind of gaming on record: wargaming. One early reader described it as like eavesdropping on dozens of different conversations between GenCon and the Pentagon.

Future writing will continue to address a balance of academic and wider audiences.