Core Faculty from the Department of English

Jennifer Bay (Professor, specializing in professional writing, rhetoric, AI)
Professor Bay is an affiliated faculty member with the Tech Justice Lab in the Honors College and is mentoring four undergraduates on scholarly projects with AI. She has published several articles on AI and methodology, and is currently working on research related to AI voice and AI within the history of technologies. One of the strengths she brings is working with interns and professional development, having organized internship programs for over 20 years and having served in job placement committees in English. Her role will be to help students position themselves on the job market, both academic or industry, to ensure they can translate the special skills they have gained in this cohort to a long-term career.

Dino Franco Felluga (Professor, specializing in critical theory, digital humanities)
Prof Felluga has been working over the last 30 years on the transformation of knowledge caused by the digital revolution, exploring that transformation not only in terms of critical theory (Novel-Poetry: The Shape of the Real and the Problem of Form; Critical Theory: The Key Concepts; and his current manuscript, Open Assembly) but also in terms of platform creation (from one of the first successful online journals, Romanticism on the Net; to experimental online writing platforms like NINES, BRANCH, and his most recent project, COVE, which in 2025 completed a 3-year, $350,000 National Endowment for the Humanities grant). Graduate students in the cohort will be able to apply what they learn to ongoing digital humanities projects by coming to Purdue, thus increasing their options in diverse career tracks.

Robert P. Marzec (Professor, specializing in literary theory, technology, authorship)
Prof Marzec specializes in contemporary literary theory, with emphasis on the history and philosophy of technology, authorship, textuality, and interpretation. He is currently working on a monograph (AI, Intelligence, Populism); a proposed edited collection for Cambridge UP (The New Literature and AI Studies); a proposed monograph for Cambridge UP (Introduction to Literature and AI).  His work brings the tradition of post-structuralist and contemporary theory—including Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, N. Katherine Hayles, David Golumbia, Dennis Yi Tenen, Lauren Klein, Matthew Kirschenbaum, Ted Underwood, Kate Crawford, Hubert Dreyfus, Bernard Stiegler, Gilbert Simondon,  and their interlocutors—into dialogue with questions posed by generative AI. Current work investigates computational models of literary meaning and the radical epistemic rupture in human knowledge production post-2022. He also brings expertise in world literature and the politics of the literary canon, including questions of whose texts are and are not represented in AI training corpora.

Thomas J. Rickert (Professor, specializing in rhetorical theory, media, technology)
Prof Thomas J. Rickert’s research interests are oriented on histories and theories of rhetoric, with particular focuses on the sophists, comparative rhetoric, ecology, and post-phenomenological approaches to media and technology. He has published Acts of Enjoyment: Rhetoric, Zizek, and the Return of the Subject (2007) and Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being (2013), both with Pittsburgh University Press. He has published essays in Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Philosophy & Rhetoric, Review of Communication, and Rhetorica. Recent work has addressed the relations of rhetoric to media and technology in Ancient Greece and in the contemporary world. His current book project addresses how the sophists anticipated and help us work through challenges brought on by digitality, including the incursion of AI and algorithms into the lifeworld.