Aaron Santesso

Aaron Santesso is Professor of Literature at Georgia Tech. Before coming to Georgia Tech, he taught at Wesleyan University and the University of Nevada. With David Rosen (Trinity College, CT), he is author of The Watchman in Pieces: Surveillance, Literature, and Liberal Personhood (Yale University Press), which was awarded the James Russell Lowell Prize by the Modern Language Association. The book argues that, since the Renaissance, changes in observation strategies have driven innovations in literature; literature, in turn, has provided a laboratory and forum for the way we think about surveillance and privacy. Ultimately, the book contends that the habits of mind cultivated by literature make rational and self-aware participation in contemporary surveillance environments possible. Professor Santesso's first book, A Careful Longing: The Poetics and Problems of Nostalgia, argues that our modern understanding of nostalgia is partly the legacy of eighteenth-century “nostalgia poems.” He has co-edited three books, including a collection on Swift and satire from Cambridge University Press. He has published articles on privacy law, surveillance theory, early modern education, literary tourism, science fiction and other topics in a number of journals and law reviews, including ELH, Modern Philology, American Literary History, Modern Fiction Studies, Eighteenth-Century Studies, Science Fiction Studies, and Law and Literature. With Professor Rosen, he has written for Slate, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and other venues. His present research revolves around the connections between literature and liberalism.