About Alex

Alex Saum-Pascual. Photo by Brittany Hosea-Small.

Alex Saum-Pascual is a (digital) poet and professor. She is author of #Postweb! Crear con la máquina y en la red (Iberoamericana-Vervuert 2018) and numerous articles, special issues and book chapters on digital media and literature in the Spanish-speaking world, being featured in The Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, Comparative Literature Studies, The Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, and Digital Humanities Quarterly, among others. Her work has been supported by fellowships and grants from UC Berkeley’s Hellman Fund, the Peder Sather Center for Advance Studies and the Townsend Center for the Humanities. As an artist, she is interested in the intersection of female representation in digital media and online spaces as these relate to offline environments in the current climate emergency. Her digital artwork and poetry have been exhibited or performed in galleries, museums, and art festivals internationally and have been studied in specialized articles and monographs such as Mujeres poetas del mundo digital (2020) and Ciberfeminismos: Tecnotextualidades y transgéneros (2023). Her digital art has also been anthologized in the Electronic Literature Collection Vol. 4 (2022), the main anthology of its kind. Delving between art practice and scholarship, Saum-Pascual also has experience curating shows of digital literature, both at UC Berkeley and abroad. Currently, she is Associate Professor of Contemporary Spanish Literature and New Media at the University of California, Berkeley. She is also part of the Executive Committee of the Berkeley Center for New Media, the advisory board of the Arts Research Center (Poetry and the Senses programs), and the board of directors of the Electronic Literature Organization. She is also one of the editors of the Electronic Literature series at Bloomsbury Academic Press.

Her research expands on the relationship between literature and digital technologies from different perspectives. Her book #Postweb! Crear con la máquina y en la red (Iberoamericana-Vervuert, 2018) analyzes the influence of electronic writing technologies on both printed and born-digital books, exploring what this means for literary experimentalism, and for the prevalence of the literary canon in Spain, in decay since the financial and institutional crisis of 2002 and 2008.

Her new book project, Earthy Algorithms: A Materialist Reading of Digital Literature in the Hispanic World (forthcoming 2025) examines the imbrication of digital technologies in literary production, looking at its engagement with concepts of environmental crisis, through a (new) materialist lens. Saum-Pascual focuses on the work of digital artists from Spain and the Latin American Diaspora to examine digital materiality in relation to its physical and signifying strategies, as well as regarding modern abstract binaries that separate the Earth from its human and non-human inhabitants. By challenging the aesthetics of algorithmic abstraction, Saum-Pascual’s reading of these digital works rejects the purported disconnection between land, matter, body, and globalization’s free circulation of goods, and emphasizes, instead, the material impact of capitalism’s digital infrastructures. This book argues that digital technologies are a radicalization of the Cartesian dualist project that has propelled modernity’s exploitation of the Earth, and proposes digital literature as a means to imagine more livable (digital) futures.

Professor Saum-Pascual teaches a broad range of undergraduate and graduate courses on contemporary Spanish culture, digital media, and literature (digital or not) combining the study of literary texts with other cultural products of the 20th and 21st centuries. She has taught courses exploring the role of media on the construction of cultural imaginaries, the importance of television shows and their adaptation of social realists works, and the role of theater, popular music, or digital and social media, as well as artificial intelligence, as means of protest and artistic expression. She is particularly keen on the study of electronic literature (digital prose and poetry) from Latin America and Spain, which she has taught at all levels.

By applying a methodological scope coming from the fields of New Media and Electronic Literature, Saum-Pascual offers a unique contribution to the field of Digital Humanities in Spanish, and to transatlantic literary and cultural studies overall.

Alex used to be on Twitter/X as @alexsaum, and is now at Blue Sky as @alexsaum.bsky.social. She also sometimes stops by Mastodon as @alexsaum@hcommons.social.

Find Alex at saum-pascual at berkeley dot edu

Some News, Books and Articles about Alex

“Pandemic Genres: Processing the COVID-19 Pandemic through Electronic Literature” (2023)

Ciberfeminismos, tecnotextualidades y transgéneros. Literatura digital en español escrita por mujeres (2023)

“Two video-poems by Prof. Saum-Pascual featured at The Instituto Cervantes in New York City” (2023)

“Autorrepresentación y lectura del cuerpo en la literatura digital femenina. El caso de Alex Saum” (2023)

“Intertextualidad en la ciberpoesía escrita por mujeres en español: enciclopedismo y collage” (2023)

“Multilingüismo e hibridación en la poesía electrónica en español” (2023)

“La escritura digital tiene nombre de mujer” (10/12/2022)

“COVID E-LIT: Digital Art during the Pandemic, a new documentary” (03/15/2022)

Mujeres poetas en el mundo digital, de Encarna Alonso (12/01/2020)

“Digital litteratur fra revolution til pandemi, af Søren Pold” (9/01/2020)