Anna Shechtman

Anna Shechtman is an Assistant Professor of Literatures in English at Cornell University, specializing in media studies and American literature. She is writing a two-volume history of the “media” and “data” concepts in the United States. The first examines the social formations and technologies of production that have allowed "media" to incorporate—and even supersede—the categories of "art," "literature," "communication," and "culture" in the second half of the 20th century. The second challenges the notion that “data” has always been the proprietary domain of social scientists, improperly imported into the study of literature by digital humanists.

Her research has been published in Critical Inquiry, Representations, and nonsite.org, among other journals. Her freelance essays and reviews have appeared in many outlets, including ArtForum, the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, the Yale Review, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, where she is an editor-at-large.

She writes monthly crossword puzzles for the New Yorker, and her first book, The Riddles of the Sphinx, was published by HarperOne in 2024.