Steve Nathaniel is an Assistant Professor of Integrative Studies at Grand Valley State University, where he teaches interdisciplinary coursework at the intersections of literature and technology.

My teaching and research examine the stories we tell about technology, as well as the way technology shapes our storytelling. Specifically, I study the intersections of technology and race in modernist literature and film. For example, I have written on the psychology of surveillance in African American biography, as well as on Zora Neale Hurston and biometric science. My work also draws on my past career in mechanical engineering, which has led me to publish on the concepts of efficiency, acoustics, and recording. Broadly, I am intrigued by the impetuously optimistic and precipitously pessimistic forms of imagination that mark technological revolutions.

I encourage my students to adopt an exploratory, collaborative approach that recognizes our contemporary social challenges echoed across history. For instance, in my social media course, students explore the way digital surveillance reflects the forms of eavesdropping that emerged with the telephone party line. Or in my Afrofuturism course, students investigate the evolving literary forms that emerged over the course of the twentieth century in response to racist pseudoscience.

Most recently I have been at work on my first book, Muting Modernism: Sonic Technique and the Culture of Silence, which rehabilitates silence to the cultural history of transmission technology, with the goal of recovering the forgotten listening practices that emerged amidst modernism’s noisy soundscape and remain relevant in today’s technoculture. I am also excited about my developing scholarship that examines the relationship between transatlantic Black literature and electronic surveillance.

I bring past work in technical fields–including aerospace and defense–both to my research and my teaching. I am fascinated by the challenge of integrating literary and scientific methods and, moreover, of welcoming the scientifically minded to the humanities classroom. As a former undergraduate scholar of the sciences who was won over by literature, I am committed to confronting the intellectual (and personal) misgivings than non-majors often face when crossing into unfamiliar disciplines.