MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing

About MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing

Featuring a wide assortment of interviews and event archives, the MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing podcast features the best of our field's critical analysis, collaborative research, and design -- all across a variety of media arts, forms, and practices. You can learn more about us, including info about our faculty and academic programs and how to join us in person for events, at cmsw.mit.edu.

Publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Category

education

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

8 Feb 2006

Latest episode

5 Apr 2026

Latest episodes

1 of 407 episodes have a transcript.

1. 

   5 Apr 2026TRANSCRIPT

   A Reading with Poet Laureate Arthur Sze

   This reading, part of MIT’s William Corbett Poetry Series, welcomes former U.S. Poet Laureate Arthur Sze back to the campus where he began his literary journey. Introduced by Chloe Garcia Roberts and Nick Montfort, the event reflects on poetry’s enduring place at MIT and its power to shape lives and communities across generations. Sze’s visit highlights the unexpected connections and “rhymes” that emerge over time through teaching, mentorship, and the art of poetry. Sze is the author of twelve books of poetry, including Into the Hush (2025) and The White Orchard: Selected Interviews, Essays, and Poems (2025); The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems (2021); Sight Lines (2019), for which he won the National Book Award; Compass Rose (2014); The Ginkgo Light (2009); Quipu (2005); The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970–1998 (1998); and Archipelago (1995). He also authored Transient Worlds: On Translating Poetry (forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press, 2026), The Silk Dragon II: Translations of Chinese Poetry (2024), and edited Chinese Writers on Writing (2010). His poetry has been translated into fifteen languages, including Chinese, Dutch, German, Portuguese, and Spanish. He received the 2025 Bollingen Prize for lifetime achievement in American poetry, the 2024 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, 2024 National Book Foundation Science + Literature award, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Jackson Poetry Prize, a Lannan Literary Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among others. A chancellor emeritus of the Academy of American Poets and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he was the 2023–2024 Mohr Visiting Poet at Stanford University. Professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA), Sze was the first poet laureate of Santa Fe, where he lives with his wife, the poet Carol Moldaw. The reading was presented by Comparative Media Studies/Writing and the William Corbett Poetry Series, with Lit@MIT and the MIT Press Bookstore.

2. 

   4 Oct 2023

   "Pomegranate" reading and discussion, with the book's author Helen Elaine Lee

   The acclaimed author of "The Serpent’s Gift", Helen Elaine Lee, returns with this poetic and powerful journey of healing and autonomy. About the Book As she wraps up her four-year sentence for opiate possession at Oak Hills Correctional Center, Ranita Atwater is determined to stay clean and regain custody of her two children from the aunts who have been raising them. Leaving behind her lover Maxine, who has helped to awaken and inspire her, she must face a world of temptations, confront the wounds that refuse to stay buried, and honor the body that has seldom felt like it belongs to her. As novelist Jennifer Haigh has said, “Ranita’s journey out of addiction and incarceration and early trauma, her daily struggle to live a life as large as her spirit, is a remarkable feat of literary conjuration. This is what novels are for.”

3. 

   9 Apr 2023

   Bernard Geoghegan, “Learning to Code: From Information Theory to French Theory”

   How and why, in the latter half of the twentieth century, did informatic theories of “code” developed around cybernetics and information theory take root in research settings as varied as Palo Alto family therapy, Parisian semiotics, and new-fangled cultural theories ascendant at US liberal arts colleges? Drawing on his recently published book “Code: From Information Theory to French Theory,” and primary sources from the MIT archives, this talk explores how far-flung technocratic exercises in Asian colonies and MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE) inspired these varied and diverse audiences in a common dream of “learning to code.” The result is a new history of the ambitions behind the rise of “theory” in the US humanities, and the obscure ties of that endeavor to Progressive Era technocracy, US foundations, and the growing prestige of technology and engineering in 20th century life. Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan is a Reader in the History and Theory of Digital Media at King’s College London. An overarching theme of his research is how “cultural” and “humanistic” sciences shape—and are shaped by—digital media. His attention to cultural factors in technical systems also figured in his work as a curator, notably for the Anthropocene and Technosphere projects at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt. Duke University Press recently published his book Code: From Information Theory to French Theory (2023), based partly on archival research he undertook as a visiting PhD student at MIT around 2008.

Inside a recent episode

A Reading with Poet Laureate Arthur Sze

Published 5 Apr 2026 · Transcript excerpt

[…] First extinction in the Galapagos Islands, the least vermilion flycatcher. Hopis drill a foot deep and plant blue corn along a wash. Danger, a woman brushed on the side of a napalm bomb. In an oblong box emptied of firewood, a black widow web. Shaving, he nicked himself and stared in the mirror in a moment of blood. Out of a saddlebag, a teen pulls a severed goat's head. Before signing his name, he recalls hotel rooms were once used as torture chambers. In Thessaloniki, the beach attendant made a gun of his hand and fired at him. Prisoners cackled when the inmate on stage said, is it not time for my painkiller? […]

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