Tenen is an associate professor at Columbia whose work examines the intersection of people, texts, and technologies. He previously served as a Microsoft engineer and fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, with code deployed across millions of computers globally. He earned his doctorate in Comparative Literature from Harvard under Elaine Scarry and William Todd's guidance. As co-founder of Columbia's Group for Experimental Methods in Humanistic Research and editor of the On Method series at Columbia University Press, he authored Plain Text: The Poetics of Computation (Stanford University Press, 2017). His scholarship appears in Modern Philology, New Literary History, Amodern, boundary2, and other journals, covering literary theory, media history, and computational narratology. His forthcoming work examines artificial intelligence's creative limitations.
- Literary Theory for Robots: How Computers Learned to Write (2024) Book
- Plain Text: The Poetics of Computation (2017) Book
Roundtable Appearances
