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Welcome to Andrew Pilsch’s Webpage

Andrew Pilsch is a graduate fellow at The Pennsylvania State University. His research focuses on the rhetorical history and legacy of cybernetics in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, with specific interest in science fiction, emerging media, poststructuralism, and postmodernism.

He currently teaches composition courses for the English Department at Penn State that make use of a range of digital technologies, including wikis.

Vita

Andrew Pilsch

Department of English Literature
Pennsylvania State University
University Park, PA 16803

  • MA: English Literature, Pennsylvania State University, 2007.
  • BS: Computer Science, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2005
  • BS: Science, Technology, and Culture, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2005

Dissertation

Transhumanism – The dissertation offers a genealogical account of the development of “transhumanism”, a discourse of late 20th century science, religion, and philosophy in which the human is constructed as an object of ongoing evolutionary processes. Connected to theories of the cyborg, the post-human, and various fringe sciences (cryonics, extropianism, radical life extension, etc.), transhumanism is a broad discursive community all arguing about what it means for the human to be changing through various evolutionary processes. The project ties together poststructural theory, rhetorical analysis, science studies, and science fiction to trace a historical progression of this concept in the post-WWII world.

Committee

  • Richard Doyle (English)
  • Jeffrey Nealon (English)
  • Mark Morrison (English)
  • Robert Yarber (Art)

Research Interests

  • Rhetorical Theory
  • Literary Theory
  • Emerging Media
  • Science Studies
  • Cultural Studies
  • Postmodern Culture
  • Science Fiction

Papers Presented

Publications

  • Book Review – “Contagious Narratives: Towards a Global Epidemiology in Priscilla Wald’s Contagious“ Review Of Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative by Priscilla Wald. BioSocieties, 4.2-3 (2009): 326-328.

Teaching Experience

  • Rhetoric & Composition (ENGL 015, 6 sections 2005-Present) – This first-year composition option at Penn State introduces students to college writing, critical thinking, & basic rhetorical theory.
  • Effective Writing: Technical Writing (ENGL 202C, 4 Sections 2007-2008) – Advanced composition class for students in science and engineering fields. Focus on document design, readability, and technologies of communication.
  • Science Fiction (ENGL 191, Fall 2009) – A general introduction to science fiction in the 20th century. Class focuses on engaging critically with these texts.

Professional Service

  • PhD Representative, EGO: The English Graduate Organization, 2007.

Awards / Grants

  • Philip Young Memorial Endowment in American Literature, Spring 2006.

Professional Affiliations

  • The Modern Language Association
  • The Society for Literature, Science, & the Arts

Teaching

Teaching Experience

  • Rhetoric & Composition (ENGL 015, 6 sections 2005-Present) – This first-year composition option at Penn State introduces students to college writing, critical thinking, & basic rhetorical theory.
  • Effective Writing: Technical Writing (ENGL 202C, 4 Sections 2007-2008) – Advanced composition class for students in science and engineering fields. Focus on document design, readability, and technologies of communication.
  • Science Fiction (ENGL 191, Fall 2009) – A general introduction to science fiction in the 20th century. Class focuses on engaging critically with these texts.

Teaching Philosophy

“His dream was not so much to give a lecture to humans as to provide a program for pure computers.” – Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

My goals in teaching classes in both rhetoric and literature are intimately connected with my research interests. In my dissertation, I write about “transhumanism,” a discursive community aimed at grappling with humans as objects of ongoing evolutionary processes. Often, these evolutionary processes have, specifically, to do with the evolutionary pressures exerted by new and emerging, digital technologies. As such, my motivation as a teacher is to better equip my students to deal with these pressures. Overall, I view my teaching as a chance to direct students in ways of living in a digital media ecology and preparing them for a future of ongoing, accelerating technological change.

This goal expresses itself differently, depending on the class being taught. For instance, in teaching Technical Communication, which I have done four times so far, I made an interesting discovery regarding my students and their attitudes towards writing. In conducting classroom discussion, I found that, thanks to Penn State’s various internship and co-op programs, my students mostly had experience writing in a professional, scientific capacity. What they lacked, however, was basic knowledge of digital document production. As such, I’ve retooled my teaching of this subject to focus on combining content production and document design. In this fashion, students spend as much time focusing on how they write as on what they write. The class includes assignments in both report writing and webpage design. I find that students benefit more from this approach, as they can leave my course with marketable, new media skills in addition to a better understanding of the rhetorical stakes of technical writing. More importantly, I stress the importance of developing digital problem solving strategies, rather than specific tool use, so that students in my classes can be better prepared for a changing, evolving digital workplace.

My teaching of science fiction, which is a new experience for me, affords another opportunity for dealing pedagogically with the tenants of transhumanism. Where the technical communications classroom becomes a workshop for applied transhumanism, I view the science fiction classroom as focusing on the philosophical implications of this discourse. By focusing on close analysis of various texts that grapple with the nature of a radically altered future, I attempt to direct students toward thinking seriously about the ethical, moral, and philosophical issues raised by the rapid technological change experienced by the United States following World War II (which corresponds to the high point of American SF). Additionally, as many of these processes of change and acceleration are ongoing (especially with regards to emerging Internet technologies and mobile computing), I view science fiction pedagogy as an opportunity to raise my students’ awareness that the issues raised in SF are, increasingly, being raised in their lives and their futures.

In both of these cases, I find focusing on the ongoing evolution of the human condition, by viewing my pedagogy from a transhuman perspective, both personally rewarding and hugely beneficial to my students in the classroom and beyond. While also helping them learn the course material at hand, my transhuman perspective allows students to step out of the classroom and the university with highly valuable “take-away” skills that can be applied in their future lives as students and as professionals. As such, I look forward to continue to explore this perspective in new and exciting pedagogical environments.

Research

Research Interests

Andrew Pilsch is a researcher interested in the rhetorical history and philosophical legacy of cybernetics. This overarching interest feeds into many of his current projects in a number of ways.

Graduate Seminars

Spring 2009

Fall 2007

Spring 2007

Fall 2006

Spring 2006

Fall 2005

Design Statement

This site was developed, from scratch, by Andrew Pilsch. The page is written in PHP and Javascript, utilizing the Mootools Javascript framework. The accordion effect is a plugin in for Mootools, but all other aspects of the site, including page loading, were coded by Andrew Pilsch, based on the framework. The pages are created in WordPress and marked up in Textile. These pages are then extracted from WordPress using the native mysql layer in PHP and loaded using AJAX.

Managing the content from WordPress allows for great ease in page creation, as does the use of Textile. Similarly, the Javascript framework is constructed to highlight the intersection between visually appealing display and manageable content. While each page is dynamically loaded, the usage of internal anchors allows for permanent linking to specific pages.