Research Interests for Rob Mitchell

Robert Mitchell is interested in relationships between the sciences and prose and poetry of the Romantic era, and in the role of theories of emotional communication (for example, sympathy and identification) in eighteenth-century and Romantic-era philosophy and literature. He is also interested in contemporary intersections between information technologies, genetics, and commerce, especially as these have been played out in the legal, literary, and artistic spheres. He has published articles about the role of sympathy and systems in Adam Smith's moral philosophy, the vision of science in Percy Bysshe Shelley's early poetry, and Coleridge's interest in the sacrifices demanded by systems, among other topics. He has published two monographs: Sympathy and the State in the Romantic Era: Systems, State Finance, and the Shadows of Futurity (Routledge, 2007) and Bioart and the Vitality of Media (University of Washington Press, 2010). He is co-author of the monograph Tissue Economies: Blood, Organs and Cell Lines in Late Capitalism (Duke UP, 2006) and the DVD-ROM Biofutures: Owning Body Parts and Information (U of Pennsylvania P, 2008). He is also co-editor of two collections of essays--Semiotic Flesh: Information and the Human Body (University of Washington Press, 2002) and Data Made Flesh: Embodying Information (Routledge, 2003)--and co-editor of the book series In Vivo: The Cultural Mediations of Biomedical Science (University of Washington Press). He is currently working on a monograph on the role of experimentation in Romantic-era vitalist science and literature.

Areas of Interest:

British Romanticism
German Romanticism
British and French Literature of the Enlightenment/Eighteenth-Century Critical Theory/History of Criticism
Media and Communication History and Theory
Twentieth-Century French and German Philosophy
European Intellectual History

Representative Publications

1. with J. Khalip, Releasing the Image: From Literature to New Media (2011), Stanford University Press [ref=sr_1_1]
2. R. Mitchell et. al, Genomics, Biobanks, and the Trade-Secret Model, Science, vol. 332 (15 April 2011), pp. 309-310
3. R. Mitchell, Suspended Animation, Slow Time, and the Poetics of Trance, PMLA, vol. 126 no. 1 (2011), pp. 107-122
4. R. Mitchell, Cryptogamia, European Romantic Review, vol. 21 no. 5 (2010), pp. 631-51
5. R. Mitchell, Bioart and the Vitality of Media (2010), University of Washington Press [ref=sr_1_1]
6. with C. Waldby, National Biobanks: Clinical Labour, Risk Production, and the Creation of Biovalue, Science, Technology, and Human Values, vol. 35 no. 3 (2010), pp. 330-355
7. with Helen Burgess, Phillip Thurtle, Biofutures: Owning Body Parts and Information (2008), University of Pennsylvania Press (DVD-ROM.) [html]
8. R. Mitchell, ‘Beings that have existence only in ye minds of men’: State Finance and the Origins of the Collective Imagination, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, vol. 49 no. 2 (2008), pp. 117-139
9. R. Mitchell, Sacrifice, Individuation, and the Economics of Genomics, Literature and Medicine, vol. 26 no. 1 (Spring, 2007), pp. 126-158
10. R. Mitchell, The Fane of Tescalipoca: S. T. Coleridge on the Sacrificial Economies of Systems in the 1790s, Studies in Romanticism, vol. 46 no. 1 (2007), pp. 105-27
11. with P. Thurtle, ‘The Acme Novelty Library’: Comic Books, Repetition, and the Return of the New, Configurations, vol. 15 no. 3 (2007), pp. 267–297
12. R. Mitchell, Sympathy and the State in the Romantic Era: Systems, State Finance, and the Shadows of Futurity (2007), Routledge [102-8880685-5627335]
13. with C. Waldby, Tissue Economies: Blood, Organs, and Cell Lines in Late Capitalism (2006), Duke University Press [102-8880685-5627335]
14. with P. Thurtle, Data Made Flesh: Embodying Information (2003), Routledge [104-7461896-1670304]