Dr Zara Dinnen, BA (Leeds) MA (Leeds) PhD (Birkbeck)

Profile

 I have been at QMUL since 2017. My research has focused on new media and popular culture. I am currently working on a project on 'repair' and cultural life in the UK today. I am an active member of the QMUL UCU branch. 

Teaching

I teach across the undergraduate and postgraduate English Literature programmes, and on the MA Digital Media. 

Undergraduate Teaching

I have taught on:

• ESH5006: Reading the Present
• ESH293: The Long Contemporary
• ESH6058: Look Who’s Computing Now

Postgraduate Teaching

I have also taught:

• ESH7010: The State of the Novel
• STA7010: Theories and Critical Concepts of Digital Media and Society

Research

Research Interests:

• Contemporary literature 
• Popular culture 
• New media
• Visual culture
• Digital culture

Recent and On-Going Research

My recent research considers ideas of 'use' and 'repair'. I am interested in the possible limits and horizons of reparative affects in contemporary UK culture; and in the figure of the 'user' as a subject and mode of subjectivity in the historical present.  

My first book explored what I term ‘the digital banal’. The digital banal describes the way we encounter new media as already boring, and so are unable to engage with the novelty of our mediational everyday lives. In the book I turned to literary realism and 'real' stories of digital media, thinking in part about genre as a way we end up always already bored at radical changes in our ways of life.  

Publications

Recent work:

(Short essay): 'A Sector in Freefall', LRB blog, April 2025
(Article) ‘Becoming User: Oracle, Barbara Gordon, and Representations of the User in Popular Culture’, Camera Obscura 114, 38.3: 141-171. 
(Essay) with James Eastwood, ‘How to Stop a University’, Notes from Below (December 2022).
(Review Essay) ‘Automation Anxiety’, American Literary History, 34.2 (Summer 2022): 626-634.
(Interview) ‘Interview with Zach Blas’, The White Review Issue 32 (March 2022). 
(Interview) ‘Conceptualising the User’, a conversation with Niall Docherty of Microsoft https://pauseforthought.net/entry/conceptualising-the-user/ (September 2021).
(Book) The Digital Banal: New Media and American Literature and Culture, Columbia UP, 2018.
(Book) Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Narrative Theories, Eds. Zara Dinnen and Robyn Warhol, Edinburgh UP, 2018.
(Article) with Sam McBean ‘The Face as technology’, New Formations 93 (Summer 2018): 122-137.
(Article) ‘Understanding the Funny Military Music Video’, Journal of American Studies, 50.4 (November 2016): 899-921.
(Article) ‘Breaking out that Perl Script: The imaging and imagining of code in The Social Network and Catfish’, European Journal of American Culture. 32.2 (2013).
(Chapter) ‘Becoming User in Popular Culture’ in Affect and Social Media, eds. Tony D. Sampson, Darren Ellis, Stephen Maddison, Rowman & Littlefield, 2018. 

Supervision

I would welcome enquiries from potential doctoral students interested in any of the areas of my research.