Event • 5:30 p.m. ET • Hybrid

Matthew Kirschenbaum: From text to .txt: Making Material Messes in a Sloppy World
The 2026 Sol M. and Mary Ann O’Brian Endowed Lecture

6 Jul
A graphic with the words/letters "text" "txt" and ".txt" stacked in repeated cascading layers. At the top of the image, the word "text" is in bold red while the other layers fade out. As one moves down the page, "text" fades out while ".txt" in black letters fades in.
  • Date
    Monday, 6 July 2026
  • time
    5:30 pm ET
  • Location
    Room 330, UVA’s Shannon Library (160 McCormick Rd) & via Zoom livestream
  • Details
    Free & open to the public. Reception to follow at RBS (UVA’s Edgar Shannon Library, Room 230).
  • The 2026 Sol M. and Mary Ann O’Brian Endowed Lecture

By the turn of the millennium, the word “text” had become a verb. Three-and-a-half years ago, ChatGPT was released into the wild, decisively severing the link between writing and human expression. In 2025, Merriam-Webster’s word of the year was “slop.” This talk will offer an attenuated archaeology of what someone we know once called the textual condition. And not to give away the game, but that condition is not good: today, text functions as something much more like a fossil fuel or other extractable resource than a medium for communication and expression. Nonetheless, the talk also asks how we can still make some good old fashioned material messes in a world of slop. Examples will be provided. Refreshments will be served. There may even be a book or two.

Find Shannon Library Room 330
Register for the Zoom livestream
Headshot of a man with brown hair and glasses in a light blue collared shirt

About the Speaker

Matthew Kirschenbaum rejoined UVA in 2025 as Commonwealth Professor of Artificial Intelligence and English after 25 years at the University of Maryland, where he finished as a Distinguished University Professor. He considers himself a student of texts and textual technologies in all their social and material forms, and his scholarship and teaching have explored literary intersects with printing and bookmaking, archival science, media archaeology, digital humanities, and now artificial intelligence.

He is the author of three books, most recently Bitstreams: The Future of Digital Literary Heritage from the University of Pennsylvania Press (2021). His first book, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (2008) was the winner of multiple awards, including the MLA Prize for a First Book. Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing (2016) enjoyed widespread public media attention. Recent articles have appeared in PMLA, Critical Inquiry, and ELH; and he frequently writes for popular outlets, which have included the Atlantic, the Washington Post, Slate, Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. Kirschenbaum is an active member of the Modern Language Association’s task force on AI in Research and Teaching, and a member of the teaching faculty at Rare Book School. He has been a Guggenheim and an NEH Fellow, and is a practicing letterpress printer.

Current projects includes two books, the first on the political economy of text in the present moment and the second on the weaponization of AI in what some have called a full-blown epistemic crisis. You can find him on Bluesky at @mkirschenbaum.bsky.social.

This event is part of Rare Book School’s 2026 Summer Lecture Series.

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