In her dissertation, "Technologies of Expression: Writing Poetry in Postwar America," Rebecca Gaydos (English) examines the relation between the literary arts and technoscience in post-World War II America. She considers avant-garde poetry alongside contemporaneous developments in cybernetics, computing, and biology that redrew the boundaries between the human and the mechanical, and the natural and the technological. Gaydos makes the claim that poetry in this moment is similarly engaged in reformulating the human subject and in examining how technologies and material objects organize and inform human endeavors. Taking issue with the common view that this literary moment marks a return to the romanticist idea of the poem as the direct outpouring of an expressive individual, Gaydos argues that the poetry of this period offers a radical reconsideration of the role of the individual in creative production.

Ms. Gaydos is also the recipient of the Norman Jacobson Memorial Teaching Award.