Dennis Tenen

Dennis Yi Tenen is an associate professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he co-directs the Narrative Intelligence Lab. He joined the faculty in 2012 as an assistant professor and was promoted to associate professor in 2018. Tenen earned his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University in 2012, with a dissertation titled “The Poetics of Human-Computer Interaction,” supervised by Elaine Scarry, William Todd, and Michel Chaouli. He holds B.A. degrees with high honors in Comparative Literature and in Political Science from the University of Michigan in 2001. Prior to his academic career, he worked as a software engineer in Microsoft’s WebTV, Media Center, and Windows XP groups from 2000 to 2004. He also served as a lecturer in Comparative Literature at Harvard University in spring 2012 and was an academic fellow and member of metaLab and Cooperation research groups at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society from 2011 to 2016.

Tenen’s research focuses on literary history, media theory, computational humanities, sociology of literature, narratology, history of science and technology, literary theory, history of the book and manuscript studies, philosophy, aesthetics, history of ideas, sociology of knowledge, film, media, visual studies, formal methods, and computational narratology. He is the author of Plain Text: The Poetics of Computation (Stanford University Press, 2017) and Literary Theory for Robots (W.W. Norton, 2024), with Author Function under contract with the University of Chicago Press. Selected articles include “Blunt Instrumentalism: On Tools and Methods” in Debates in the Digital Humanities (2016), “Toward a Computational Archaeology of Fictional Space” in New Literary History (2018), “The Emergence of American Formalism” in Modern Philology (2019), “Laminate Text: The Strata of Digital Inscription” in Amodern (2017), “Unintelligent Design” in boundary 2 (2017), and “Distributed Agency in the Novel” in New Literary History (2022). Tenen co-founded Columbia’s Group for Experimental Methods in the Humanities, edits Columbia University Press’s On Method book series since 2019, and serves on the executive committee of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society since 2018. He is an affiliated faculty member of Columbia’s Data Science Institute, Center for Data, Media, and Society, and Center for Comparative Media. His awards include the Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award (2026) for excellence in teaching, research, and mentorship; Heyman Center Faculty Fellowship (2017–2018); Lenfest Junior Faculty Development Grant (2016–2017); Schoff Publication Fund award (2019); and Schofield Fund Publication Award (2019, 2016).

Professional Email: dt2406@columbia.edu