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. 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.
Kirschenbaum is a longtime RBS faculty member, having previously co-taught the course on born-digital materials. A practicing letterpress printer, he co-founded and co-directed BookLab and the Plaintxt Press at the University of Maryland. He is an active member of the Modern Language Association’s task force on AI in Research and Teaching, and he has delivered the annual Rosenbach, Breslaur, Brownell, Fales, and McKenzie lectures, among others. He also has been a Guggenheim and an NEH Fellow.You can find him on Bluesky at @mkirschenbaum.bsky.social.