Matthew G. Kirschenbaum is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Maryland and Associate Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH, an applied thinktank for the digital humanities). He is also an affiliated faculty member with the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at Maryland, and a member of the teaching faculty at the University of Virginia’s Rare Book School. Kirschenbaum served as the first director of the new Digital Cultures and Creativity living/learning program in the Honors College at Maryland.

A 2011 Guggenheim Fellow, Kirschenbaum specializes in digital humanities, electronic literature and creative new media (including games), textual studies, and postmodern/experimental literature. He has a Ph.D. in English from the University of Virginia, and was trained in humanities computing at Virginia’s Electronic Text Center and Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (where he was the Project Manager of the William Blake Archive). His dissertation was the first electronic dissertation in the English department at Virginia and one of the very first in the nation.

Kirschenbaum’s current research interests in new media include serious games and simulations, digital preservation, writing technologies and the conditions of contemporary authorship, text visualization, social media, and cyberinfrastructure. His most recent graduate seminar (spring 2010) was Simulations. He has directed or is currently directing or co-directing five dissertations. He is online at http://www.mkirschenbaum.net, Mechanisms (a blog devoted to the book), and Zone of Influence (now dormant), and Play the Past, where he contributes to a group blog on meaningful play and cultural heritage. He is also on Twitter @mkirschenbaum.