Professional Profile

Professor Mark Sample teaches and researches both contemporary American literature and New Media/Digital Culture, and he is always exploring how literary texts interact with, critique, and rework visual and media texts. He has published on The Omega Man, a cult science fiction film from the seventies, and contributed to and co-edited a special edition of Works and Days, a journal devoted to the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. Professor Sample's current research projects include a book manuscript on the early fiction of Don DeLillo and Toni Morrison, exploring their engagement with consumer culture, particularly how they use what Walter Benjamin calls "dialectical images" to reveal the latent violence of everyday things. Another project concerns the interplay between video games, the War on Terror, and the production of knowledge. Professor Sample received an M.A. in Communication, Culture, and Technology from Georgetown University (1998) and his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania (2004).