David Alworth is a Research Associate at the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government in the Harvard Kennedy School and a Visiting Full Professor at Stony Brook University (SUNY). His current research focuses on the intersection of technology, culture, and society.

He is the author Site Reading: Fiction, Art, Social Form (Princeton UP, 2016), which won the Erving Goffman Award for Outstanding Scholarship from the Media Ecology Association, and The Look of the Book: Jackets, Covers, and Art at the Edges of Literature (with Peter Mendelsund, Ten Speed/Crown/Penguin Random House, Fall 2020). He is the editor of a forthcoming Norton Critical Edition in American Literature, and his essays have appeared in venues ranging from Public Books and The Los Angeles Review of Books to New Literary History and American Literary History.  

Previously, he was the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University and the founding co-director of an interdisciplinary seminar at Harvard’s Mahindra Humanities Center. His work has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the Huntington Library. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago. 

This website is currently under construction. Please visit www.davidalworth.com for more information about his books, scholarship, editorial work, lecturing, or teaching.