Katherine D. Johnston

Katherine D. Johnston is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and the Department of Writing and Rhetoric at Stony Brook University. She received her Ph.D. in Literature with an emphasis on media and cultural studies from the University of California, Riverside. She specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century American literary studies, surveillance studies, and critical data studies. Her first book, Profiles and Plotlines: Data Surveillance in Twentieth Century Literature, was published by the University of Iowa Press as part of their New American Canon Series. Johnston investigates algorithmic data profiling as not merely an important topic in contemporary fiction, but as an increasingly dominant form of storytelling and characterization in our society. Profiles and Plotlines engages an energetic reformation of contemporary literature to account for a society and economy of frenetic counting. Other recent publications have appeared in American Literature, Twentieth Century Literature, Contemporary Women’s Writing, and the American Indian Culture and Research Journal. She teaches classes in American literature, surveillance studies, writing and composition, and the rhetoric of Big Data.