Staff profile

Bio

Dr Katie Muth is Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities and Modern Literature in the Department of English Studies at Durham University, which she joined in 2017. She specialises in digital humanities and postwar American literatures, with particular focus on computational literary studies, network and graph analysis, institutional literary history, and Cold War studies.

Dr Muth’s digital humanities practice centres on network analysis, linked data, computational stylometry, and the visualisation of large-scale archival relationships. With James Smith, she is developing Mapping the Records of the Security Service, which uses multimodal AI and knowledge graph methods to map connections among literary figures and covert state agencies during the Second World War and the Cold War period, drawing on declassified intelligence files at The National Archives alongside linked open data (LOD).

Her literary-critical work focuses on postwar and contemporary American fiction, with particular interests in postmodernism, Cold War culture, and creative labour. She has published on figures including Kathy Acker, Anne Howard Bailey, Paddy Chayefsky, Don DeLillo, Langston Hughes, Mo Yan, Thomas Pynchon, and Rod Serling. Her monograph in progress Day Jobs: Postwar American Fiction and Work draws on original archival research to examine how paid writerly labour — technical writing, copywriting, editorial work, and journalism — shaped the formal innovations of postwar American fiction. With Tim Engles (Eastern Illinois), she is co-editing The Routledge Companion to Don DeLillo (Routledge, forthcoming 2027). With Lorna Burns (St Andrews), she is co-editor of World Literature and Dissent (Routledge, 2019).

Dr Muth has held fellowships at the Huntington Library (2018) and the Harry Ransom Center (2019), as well as readerships at the Princeton University Firestone Library, the Columbia University Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Library of Congress, and the New York Public Library. She has served on Durham’s Digital Humanities Steering Group and as Athena Swan/EDI Lead for the Department of English Studies.

You can read more about her research and teaching at https://krmuth.github.io/.

• 2022: Durham Grant Seedcorn Funding for ‘Mapping the cultural/ intelligence nexus in Britain and the US, c. 1939– 1992’:
• 2019: Frederic D. Weinstein Memorial Fellowship Stipend, Harry Ransom Center:
• 2018: Mayers Fellow, The Huntington Library:

Book review

• Rev. of Christopher K. Coffman and Daniel Lukes (eds.), William T. Vollmann: A Critical Companion (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2015).
  
  Muth, K. (2016). Rev. of Christopher K. Coffman and Daniel Lukes (eds.), William T. Vollmann: A Critical Companion (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2015). Journal of American Studies, 50(1). https://doi.org/10.1017/s0021875815002479
• Rev. of Min Hyoung Song, The Children of 1965: On Writing, and Not Writing, as an Asian American (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2013).
  
  Muth, K. (2015). Rev. of Min Hyoung Song, The Children of 1965: On Writing, and Not Writing, as an Asian American (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2013). Forum for Modern Language Studies, 51(2). https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqv016
• Rev. of Stefano Ercolino, The Maximalist Novel: From Thomas Pynchon's 'Gravity's Rainbow' to Roberto Bolano's '2666' (New York; London; New Delhi; Sydney: Bloomsbury, 2014).
  
  Muth, K. (2015). Rev. of Stefano Ercolino, The Maximalist Novel: From Thomas Pynchon’s ’Gravity’s Rainbow’ to Roberto Bolano’s ’2666’ (New York; London; New Delhi; Sydney: Bloomsbury, 2014). Forum for Modern Language Studies, 51(2). https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqv013

Chapter in book

• Postmodernism and Its Discontents, Or, The Cultural Logic of Don DeLillo
  
  Muth, K. (2023). Postmodernism and Its Discontents, Or, The Cultural Logic of Don DeLillo. In J. Kavadlo (Ed.), Don DeLillo in Context. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009025676.024
• Digital Readings
  
  Muth, K. (2019). Digital Readings. In The New Pynchon Studies. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108608916.011
• The problem of dissent
  
  Muth, K. (2019). The problem of dissent. In World Literature and Dissent. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203710302-3
• Nonfiction
  
  Muth, K. (2019). Nonfiction. In Thomas Pynchon in Context. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108683784.004
• Mass Media
  
  Muth, K. (2017). Mass Media. In American Literature in Transition, 1950–1960. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108289542.003

Edited book

• World Literature and Dissent
  
  Burns, L., & Muth, K. (Eds.). (2019). World Literature and Dissent. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203710302

Journal Article

• The grammars of the system: Thomas Pynchon at Boeing
  
  Muth, K. (2019). The grammars of the system: Thomas Pynchon at Boeing. Textual Practice, 33(3). https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236x.2019.1580514
• Postmodern Fiction as Poststructuralist Theory: Kathy Acker's Blood and Guts in High School
  
  Muth, K. R. (2011). Postmodern Fiction as Poststructuralist Theory: Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School. Narrative, 19(1). https://doi.org/10.1353/nar.2011.0000