Thomas Swiss is an American poet, writer, and critic. He was a Professor of English and Rhetoric of Inquiry at the University of Iowa. He is currently professor of Culture and Teaching at the University of Minnesota.

Life more less

He’s on the editorial board of The Journal of Popular Music Studies, and other journals, and his work has authored, edited, and co-edited nine books including New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories (MIT Press, co-edited with Adalaide Morris), a collection meant to extend understanding of the computer as an expressive medium for developing works that are visually arresting, aurally charged, and formed by emergent poetics. In Highway 61 Revisited: Bob Dylan's Road from Minnesota to the World (U Minnesota Press), he and co-editor Colleen Sheehy brought together a collection of scholarly articles on Bob Dylan that prove that there are new angles from which to approach Dylan’s life, artistic evolution, and unmatched influence on music and culture. Other books include The World Wide Web and Contemporary Cultural Theory : Magic, Metaphor, Power (Routledge, co-edited with Andrew Herman) which brings together more than a dozen well-known scholars across the humanities and social sciences to explore the Web as a cultural technology characterized by a nexus of economic, political, social, and aesthetic forces engaging the thematic issues of the Web as a space where magic, metaphor, and power converge. Teaching Writing Using Blogs, Wikis, and other Digital Tools, co-written with three literacy researchers, blends theory and pedagogy on new media technology for secondary teachers of writing.

His poems have appeared in many periodicals — The American Scholar, Boston Review, Iowa Review, and have been collected in books from the University of Illinois Press (Rough Cut) and the University of Alabama Press (Measure). His collaborative new media poems and literary projects have been exhibited in museums and shows, including the 9th New York Digital Salon, School of Visual Arts, New York; Digital Arts and Culture Conference, Brown University; The British Academy, UK; Transmediale.02 Festival, Berlin, Germany; 4th International Conference on Modern Technology for Art, Media, and Design, Bangkok, Thailand; South By Southwest New Media Festival, Austin TX; Manifesta 4, The European Biennial of Contemporary Art; and the Instanbul Museum of Contemporary Art. His articles have appeared in numerous journals, including Postmodern Culture, Current Musicology, The Southern Review, and New Media and Society. His book reviews have been published in The New York Times Book Review, Contemporary Visual Arts, and Popular Music. His awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Breadloaf Writer’s Conference, and grants from many universities and state agencies.

Swiss is former editor of several academic journals, including the Iowa Review Web -- an online journal of art, writing, and interdisciplinary theory -- published by the Writing Program at the University of Iowa. He serves on the board of a number of journals, including Popular Music Studies. He has an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, where he taught in English Studies and the Project on the Rhetoric of Inquiry as professor from 2001-2005, before moving to the Culture and Teaching program at the University of Minnesota. Earlier, he taught at a private university focusing on the Arts and Sciences, and, as visiting professor, at universities in Singapore and Paris.