Research Bio

Mark Goble is a literary scholar whose research explores the intersections of literature, technology, and media from the 19th century to the present. His first book Beautiful Circuits: Modernism and the Mediated Life, examined how modernist writers engaged with the then "new" communication technologies of the telegraph, photography, and cinema. His latest book, Downtime: The Twentieth Century in Slow Motion, is a cultural history of slow motion as both a special effect in film, and a complex symbol of all the speeds--from the microscopically incremental to the fantastically accelerated--that the modern world makes us live in and through. Mixing film history with literary and cultural analysis, Downtime is the first book to consider slow motion from its origins in early cinema to it currently popularity on YouTube and beyond, where it flourishes as one of the most important aesthetics of visual media, technology, and more.

He is Professor of English at UC Berkeley and has published articles in American Literature, Modern Language Quarterly, and English Literary History. His reviews and essays have also appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books and the Brooklyn Rail. His scholarship has been recognized with fellowships from the University of California and the Mellon Foundation.

Research Expertise and Interest

American literature