Dr. Avery Slater

Biography

Avery Slater’s teaching focuses on twentieth- and twenty-first century literature in a global context. His research investigates the reconceptualization of human and nonhuman forms of language in light of the rise of information and computational technologies, with specific attention to the history of artificial intelligence and machine learning. His book project, Apparatus Poetics, explores how mid-twentieth-century poets revised and reinvented modernist theories of the poetic process in response to emerging technologies of language, including computation, artificial intelligence, and machine translation. Slater has spent the academic year 2016-2017 at the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Humanities Forum, researching the literary and philosophical contexts of postwar machine translation. He has held fellowships at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell and the University of Texas at Austin. His work has appeared in leading journals, including New Literary History, IEEE, and American Literature, as well as in edited collections on the ethics of AI and trauma literature. Slater currently leads the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society at the University of Toronto and serves on the Executive Committee of MLA’s TC Forum on Digital Humanities, in addition to being a member of the editorial board for Brill’s series on Studies in Lyric.

Research Interests