Adam Hammond


Academic Work


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Since 2017, I have worked in the Department of English at the University of Toronto (which, by the way, is the same place Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye worked), first as an Assistant Professor, now as an Associate Professor (this means I have tenure). Before that, I worked for two years in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at San Diego State University, my first tenure-track job. Before that, I had postdocs at the Universities of Guelph and Victoria. Before that, I did my M.A. and Ph.D. in the department where I now work, and my B.A. at the University of Western Ontario in London, where I mostly grew up.

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My academic work has appeared in and/or been profiled in Wired, BBC Radio, CBC Radio, The Globe and Mail, and The Walrus.

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My current claim to fame is that I teach "Literature for Our Time," the 400-student first-year English class at U of T. I love teaching, so I will brag about the teaching awards I've received: the 2025 Outstanding Teaching Award from the U of T Faculty of Arts and Science, the 2022 Northrop Frye Award from the U of T Alumni Association, and the 2017 Outstanding Faculty Award from the SDSU Department of English and Comparative Literature.

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My initial academic interest was in modernist literature, especially the modernist idea that new literary styles could promote modes of thinking conducive to cultural democracy. This was the subject of my dissertation. While I was a graduate student, I co-wrote Modernism: Keywords (Wiley-Blackwell, 2014) with Melba Cuddy-Keane and Alexandra Peat. This employed digital methods, which led me to the digital humanities, and my first solo monograph, Literature in the Digital Age (Cambridge UP, 2016). One of the chapters of that book focused on the work of the videogame designer Superbrothers, who was subject of my next book, The Far Shore (Coach House Books, 2021), a kind of academic/nonfiction hybrid that documented the development of an (initially) indie videogame, Jett, while also containing all my thinking about the relationship of modernism to DIY avant-garde practices. I have published several articles and done a lot of teaching about this idea, and it remains an interest: I am thinking lately about autofiction, including its relationship to DIY forms like zines and little magazines. Meanwhile, I was putting a lot of energy into building literary corpora (such as the Project Dialogism Novel Corpus), and developing the techniques to make use of them (many focused on emotion), in a series of publications with Graeme Hirst, Krishnapriya Vishnubhotla, Julian Brooke, and Saif Mohamed. My most recent books are a pair of edited collections for Cambridge University Press: Cambridge Critical Concepts: Technology and Literature (2023) and The Cambridge Companion to Literature in a Digital Age (2024).

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Of all the academic articles I've published, I'm proudest of my first, whose ideal of "honest criticism" I am still trying to live up to.

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