Grant Wythoff

Grant directs graduate student programs at the CDH. He advises and collaborates with faculty, staff, and students on data curation, curriculum development, and project design.

Grant's scholarship examines the ways emerging media have intersected with art and culture over the past two centuries. His latest book, A User's Guide to the Age of Tech (Univ. of Minnesota Press, Electronic Mediations series) explores how users of digital media experience, negotiate, and influence technological change — at a time when so much of that change feels out of our hands. His first book — The Perversity of Things: Hugo Gernsback on Media, Tinkering, and Scientifiction (Univ. Minnesota Press) — argues that science fiction began among the maker movement of the 1910s. It was a pilot project of the Manifold Scholarship platform for open access, multimodal books.

Elsewhere, Grant is cofounder of Philly Community Wireless, a coalition of organizers, technologists, researchers, and librarians working toward digital equity in Philadelphia by building community-owned and -operated mesh networks. Grant is also the founding editor of Startwords, a journal for experimental humanities research that he designed and built with colleagues at the CDH.

Before coming to Princeton, Grant held postdoctoral fellowships with the Columbia University Society of Fellows in the Humanities and the Penn State Center for Humanities and Information. At Columbia, Grant was a cofounder of the Group for Experimental Methods in the Humanities.

Grant has taught undergraduate and graduate courses on American naturalism, social media and the novel, global science fiction, digital culture, and book history. He written about wireless telegraphy, boredom, technocratic politics, space opera, and the history of method in the humanities. This work has appeared in venues like Digital Humanities Quarterly, Grey Room, The Washington Post, Post-45, Configurations, Amodern, The Programming Historian, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

More on his work can be found at https://wythoff.net/