Jun 4, 2026 Meagan Arthur Graduate Fellow, Spring 2026

“Afterboom”

Briefly describe your project and the challenges, lessons learned, and obstacles overcome in the execution of it. What were the professional, academic, and personal motivations underlying your project?

My project is a novel that follows a lineage of science and climate fiction, taking from what Elvia Wilk calls “the new weird,” a genre of ecosystems literature that recognizes the interdependence of biological and epistemological systems. I am interested in fictional narrative as a form of futurist world building, and particularly research that foregrounds the collective nature of human storytelling in digital spaces and its impact on humans as economic subjects. One of the goals of my project is to consider the metaphysical weirdness of humanity’s relationship to digital technologies and to re-weird a vision of the future of those technologies as narratological tools.

In working on the novel this semester with Digital Matters, I’ve encountered myriad obstacles that have allowed me to fully flesh out my intentions for the project. Artificiality and the boundary between human and technology is a key concern of the novel, and one of my characters spends time chatting with a futurist AI chatbot. One of the questions that came up while writing was: how am I going to write dialogue that is meant to be produced by a fictional AI model? If I don’t want to use any generative AI in my writing process (and I don’t), should I try to emulate the syntax and structural monotony that contemporary AI models continuously generate? Or, should I write in a new style that imagines a different kind of generative AI? What does it mean to be a human writer that is pretending to be an AI writer?

Another obstacle that I am still working to overcome is the immense worldbuilding required in the construction of the futurist timelines in my novel. Some elements of futurist worldbuilding are optimistic—i.e. this is a structure that I desire to exist in, that I think would be better or more ethical for its subjects. And then there are the parts that are both realist and theoretical—what problems do the characters within these future socioeconomic structures encounter? What motivates these futurist structures that are no longer driven by commodity and profit? All of these questions speak to the underlying goals of speculative fiction as a genre, which works to imagine different modes of meaning-making and think outside of contemporary paradigms.

How did the Digital Matters internship dovetail with your academic pursuits? What interested you in applying for this grant?

I write both critical and creative work, and for a long time, my critical interests were pretty divorced from my creative projects. I’ve spent a lot of time researching online rhetorical communities, tracking digital narratives using folkloric techniques, trying to understand social media sites as spatial compositions, and looking at narratological trends within fandom activities online. All of this critical work eventually led to the creative project I’m working on now, and Digital Matters has been the perfect place for me to bring my digital humanities background into my creative exploration.

What insights have you gained in regard to your specific field as a result of your project and grant experience?

For someone like me, working primarily within communities that solely comprise other scholars in the humanities, the best thing about Digital Matters has been the interdisciplinarity. As I endeavor to create fictional and futurist political economies, I’ve gotten to discuss worldbuilding and institutional violence with a scholar in sociology and criminology; while writing dialogue with a fictional AI chatbot, I’ve been able to discuss generative AI models with students who are working to build their own AI models. The interdisciplinary research happening in Digital Matters is what makes the space so productive and unique, and the other scholars in my cohort have added insight to my project that I couldn’t have achieved writing on my own.

What would you tell potential intern applicants to help them shape their own digital scholarship project?

My advice would be to pitch the project you’re passionate about. I’ve written grant applications that center the type of work I think application committees want to read, and those applications have not been nearly as successful as the ones in which I’m pitching my passion project that I worry might be a stretch, or too out of the box. Apply with your strange interests. You never know unless you try! Pitch your hyper-fixation, the weird thing you can’t get out of your head.