Vyshali Manivannan

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Vyshali Manivannan is a Ph.D. student in Communications at Rutgers University School of Communication and Information, with research interests in media studies, digital humanities, rhetoric and composition, comics and animation, activism, and transgressive subcultures. Her scholarship has appeared in ImageTexT and The Forum for World Literature Studies and is forthcoming in edited book-length volumes. Her creative work has been featured in Black Clock, theNewerYork, Consequence, r.kv.r.y Quarterly Literary Journal, and DIAGRAM, and in live performances such as the Asian-American Comics Convention and Yoni Ki Baat 2010. Her first novel, Invictus, was published when she was 15 and is currently under option for film adaptation. She is presently represented by Mary Krienke at Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc.

Manivannan’s current field of study focuses on transgressive Internet cultures, focusing on 4chan as an exemplar of this culture at its most extreme. Consequently, she is especially interested in Anonymous and the “A-culture” that arose around 4chan’s Anonymous, as well as memetics, Internet linguistics, institutional memory, and the intersection of lulzy media and tactics and politicization. This interest overlaps with her work on art, new media, and activism, Occupy and other decentralized movements, deindividuation, and the political effect and affect of memes, visual vernacular, and lulz.

She received her B.A. in English from Dartmouth College and also holds an M.F.A. in Fiction Writing from Columbia University School of the Arts. From 2006 to 2011, she taught Composition & Rhetoric at the undergraduate level at Columbia University, Eugene Lang College at the New School, Yeshiva College, and Montclair State University, where she served as halftime faculty. She also taught ESL Writing summer courses at CUNY City College of Technology. Additionally, she created and taught 8th-12th grade curricula in English, Creative Writing, and Academic Writing at the Countee Cullen Community Center site of the Harlem Children’s Zone and has taught in Columbia University’s summer bridge program for disadvantaged incoming freshmen. She served as a teaching assistant in the Journalism/Media Studies department at Rutgers University for three years and is currently teaching an online media studies course on media representations of gender, race, class, and sexuality. She will be teaching Media Studies courses at Baruch College in AY 2014, focusing on contemporary media forms, transgression and trolling, and hacktivism.

Prize anthology mentions

Best American Essays 2015*

* indicates notable/special mention

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