Joseph Tabbi


Joseph Tabbi is a US academic living in Norway, and is a full professor at the University of Bergen. He is a literary scholar and theorist, notable for his contributions to the fields of American literature and electronic literature.

Academic career

Tabbi received a Ph.D. from the University of Toronto in 1989 for a dissertation titled "The Psychology of Machines: Technology and Personal Identity in the Work of Norman Mailer and Thomas Pynchon." Tabbi joined the faculty of the University of Illinois Chicago, and then in 2019 he moved to the University of Bergen to take a position as Professor of English Literature. In 2023 he became one of the Principal Investigators of the.
He was the first scholar granted access to the archives of the reclusive novelist William Gaddis, and is the author of Nobody Grew but the Business: On the Life and Work of William Gaddis and the editor of The Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic Literature and Post-Digital: Critical Debates from electronic book review. His other works include Cognitive Fictions and Postmodern Sublime: Technology and American Writing from Mailer to Cyberpunk. In 2024 he published The Cambridge Introduction to Literary Posthumanism.
Tabbi edits the scholarly journal Electronic Book Review, which he founded with Mark Amerika. Tabbi is also the founder of Consortium on Electronic Literature, an "open access, non-commercial resource offering centralized access to literary databases, archives, and institutional programs" in the humanities.

Selected works

  • Edited books

  • Reading Matters: Narrative in the New Media Ecology
  • Paper Empire: William Gaddis and the World System
  • The Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic Literature
  • ''Post-Digital: Critical Debates from electronic book review''