Sarah Whitcomb Laiola - Coastal Carolina University
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Sarah Whitcomb Laiola

Assistant Professor and Coordinator of Digital Cultural and Design Major

Contact Sarah Whitcomb Laiola
843-349-6941

Edwards 106

Spring 2023 Office Hours
Mondays/Wednesdays 2:30 - 4:00pm 
and by appointment. 
*Please email for an appointment. 

I don't want to be a simile anymore,' I said. 'I want to be a metaphor.'" -- China Mieville, Embassytown

Biography

Sarah Whitcomb Laiola comes to Coastal via Georgia Institute of Technology, where from 2016-2018 she was a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow. At Georgia Tech, she taught courses in technical communication, software design, and video game design. Prior to that, she was at the University of California (Riverside), where she taught courses in freshman composition, media studies, and American literature, while completing her Ph.D. in English.

Her research is centered on digital culture and new media poetics, which means she engages with things like visual, performance, and videographic artwork, literature, and poetry that are digital, and that she engages code, databases, networks, and other digital phenomena as poetic, artistic phenomena. Within this web of art, poetics, and culture, she is especially interested in issues related to identity construction (especially raced and gendered identity ) in our increasingly digital world. This work takes her everywhere from generative poetry and storytelling "Poem.exe" (link to: https://twitter.com/poem_exe ) and "A Strange Voyage" (link to: https://twitter.com/str_voyage ) to literary (and other) games like "Strange Rain" (link to: http://opertoon.com/2010/11/strange-rain-for-ipad-iphone-ipod-touch/ ), to critical digital artwork like "The Knotted Line" that challenges what we think we know about the U.S. and its histories (link to: http://knottedline.com/ ), to YouTube video performance art like "I Am Not" that explicity engages issues of user-constructed identity (link to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8G78sFBPU_4 ).

If you are interested in knowing more about Dr. Laiola and what she works on, check out her website (link to: https://www.sarahwlaiola.com/ ). You can also find her on Twitter @sarathena192 where she tweets about these and other subjects related to her teaching and research.


Education

Ph.D, University of California (Riverside), English, 2016


M.A., University of California (Riverside), English, 2012


B.A., University of Miami (Florida), English, 2009 

Interesting Facts 

Selected Publications:


"From Float to Flicker: Information Processing, Racial Semiotics, and Anti-Racist Protest from 
'I Am a Man' to 'Black Lives Matter,'" in Criticism, Vol. 60 No. 2 (2018)



"Markup as Behavior Toward Risk: Reforming the Metanarratives of Metadata through Susan Howe's Metafictive Poetics," in American Quarterly, Vol. 
70 No. 3 (2018);

"The Alt-Social Network of Natalie Bookchin's Testament," in Television and New Media, Vol 18, No 5, 2017

Teaching Areas 

Digital Culture and Design;
 Digital Humanities;
 New Media;
Critical Making & Multimodal Composition;
 Electronic Literature and New Media Poetry

Research Areas

New Media / Digital Poetics;
 Digital Humanities;
 Digital Culture;
 Critical Race and Gender Studies;
 Visual Culture;
 20th/21st Century American literatures (focus on language-oriented poetry)

Social Media

www.sarahwlaiola.com  


Twitter: @sarathena192