Jay Clayton

Chair, Department of English
William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of English; Professor of Cinema and Media Arts, and Communication of Science, Engineering and Technology

Jay Clayton is author of four books, five edited collections, and more than 50 articles and chapters. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the NIH, and elsewhere. His published scholarship ranges from romantic poetry and the Victorian novel to contemporary American literature, film and digital media, science and literature, and medical humanities. His book, Charles Dickens in Cyberspace: The Afterlife of the Nineteenth Century in Postmodern Culture, focused on the depiction of computers, information technology, and cyborgs from the Victorian era to the twenty-first century. This study won the Suzanne M. Glasscock Humanities Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship. His most recent book is Literature, Science, and Public Policy: From Darwin to Genomics (Cambridge University Press) and is available in Open Access form here.

 

Jay Clayton received his B.A. from Yale University and his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. He began his teaching career at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he served as the first director of the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and received the Alumni Distinguished Teaching Award. At Vanderbilt, he teaches courses on Victorian literature; science fiction; game studies; literature, science, and technology; and digital media. He served as chair of the English department in 2000 and 2002–2010, Director of the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy from 2012-2022, and Acting Chair of the Theatre Department from 2023-24.