Bio
Jay Clayton is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of English at Vanderbilt University, where he also directs the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy. Before becoming director of the university’s arts policy center, he was chair of the Department of English for many years. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Institutes of Health, and he has won an award for his teaching.
He is the author of a number of books about how stories from one area of life affect other kinds of narratives: how poetry changed the novel in Romantic Vision and the Novel; how fiction shaped postmodern culture and theory in The Pleasures of Babel; how Victorian literature, science, and engineering helped build the networked world we live in today in Charles Dickens in Cyberspace. His recent work has been divided across two broad areas: the culture of gaming and the representation of genomics in literature, film, and popular culture.
