Joel Burges

Joel Burges is Associate Professor of English and Visual and Cultural Studies. He is also faculty in Film and Media Studies and Digital Media Studies. Burges is the author of Out of Sync & Out of Work: History and the Obsolescence of Labor in Contemporary Culture (Rutgers UP, 2018) and co-editor, with Amy J. Elias, of Time: A Vocabulary of the Present (NYU Press, 2016). He is at work on two books. His primary focus at present is Television and the Work of Writing, which explores writing for television as both economic labor and aesthetic craft—as work and form—from Rod Serling, Carl Reiner, William Greaves, and Tina Fey to Michaela Coel, Mindy Kaling, Jill Soloway, and Matthew Weiner. The second is Late Bourgeois Unities, a more experimental investigation of affect, form, and subjectivity in a time of class morbidity and economic stagnation. His writing has also appeared in, among other places, New German Critique, Post45, Digital Humanities Quarterly, and Cinema Journal. He is the principal investigator on Mediate, a platform for the digital annotation of audiovisual and time-based media with cross-disciplinary applications that has been used by the University of Rochester, the University of Pittsburgh, and Wake Forest University. His primary collaborators on Mediate are Emily Sherwood, Director of the Digital Scholarship Lab and Studio X at the University of Rochester, and Joshua Romphf, the head programmer of the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Rochester.