Biography
B.A., Columbia University (2015); M.F.A., University of Iowa (2018); Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania (2024)
Ethan A. Plaue is a literary and intellectual historian of media, science, and technology, specializing in American literature from the colonial era to the nineteenth century. His first book project is an intellectual history of mediation told through the literature and archives of transnational American Romanticism. Through readings of literary works by Hannah Crafts, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Michel Maxwell Philip, and Jane Johnston Schoolcraft as well as archival texts including patents for fictitious inventions, theological treatises on capitalism, and scientific papers on statistical mechanics, the book uncovers the historical discourse of mediation
as it shaped not only nineteenth-century ways of knowing but also how we experience our mediated age today. An article drawn from this project is forthcoming in PMLA.
Other essays have appeared or are forthcoming in American Literature, American Literary History, and Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture. He is currently at work on a second book project on early American infrastructure, or the material structures that sustain the more intangible cognitive structures of dwelling, belonging, and settling. In 2024-2025, he was a Drue Heinz Postdoctoral Fellow in American Literature at the University of Oxford.
