Rate My Professor Dennis Tenen

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).