Dr Ethan A. Plaue

I am a literary and intellectual historian of media, science, and technology, specializing in American literature from the colonial era to the nineteenth century. My current book project is an intellectual history of mediation told through the literature and archives of transnational American Romanticism. Through readings of literary works by Hannah Crafts, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Michel Maxwell Philip, and Jane Johnston Schoolcraft as well as archival texts including patents for fictitious inventions, theological treatises on capitalism, and scientific papers on statistical mechanics, the project uncovers the historical discourse of mediation as it shaped not only nineteenth-century ways of knowing but also how we experience our mediated age today. An article drawn from the book is forthcoming in PMLA.

Other peer-reviewed articles on media history and philosophy can be found in American Literature and Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture.