About Seth

Seth Perlow is Associate Professor of English at Georgetown University, where he is also a core faculty member of the programs in American Studies and Film & Media Studies and an affiliate of the Center for Digital Ethics. He holds a PhD in English from Cornell University, an MA in Humanities from the University of Chicago, and an AB in Comparative Literature from Brown University.

His research focuses on American poetry, with special attention to how electronics change our ways of writing and reading poems. He is the author of The Poem Electric: Technology and the American Lyric (University of Minnesota Press, 2018), which argues that devices such as the telephone, tape recorder, and web browser give poets new ways to celebrate lyric poetry’s resistance to rationalism. Perlow edited Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons: The Corrected Centennial Edition (City Lights Books, 2014), which earned a Seal of Approval from the MLA Committee on Scholarly Editions. His peer-reviewed essays and book chapters address avant-garde poetics, digital manuscript archives, human-computer interfaces, and online publishing.

His current book project, tentatively called The Digital Hand: Electronics and Literary Manuscripts, argues that electronics have transformed the study of literary manuscripts and made the appearance of handwriting a more powerful token of literary quality. Engaging a range of handwritten literature, from Edgar Allan Poe and Emily Dickinson to contemporary Instagram poets, The Digital Hand situates their work within an interdisciplinary history of graphology in order to demonstrate that the meaning of a manuscript depends on the equipment used to capture, analyze, and reproduce images of it.

In addition to his peer-reviewed scholarship, his essays about poetry and public culture have appeared in The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books, and elsewhere.

He grew up in Atlanta and now lives in Washington, DC.