Tobias Wilson-Bates
Academic Positions
Full-Time Lecturer, Georgia Institute of Technology, Fall 2017-
Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow, Georgia Institute of Technology, Fall 2015-Spting 2017.
St. Mary’s College, Visiting Lecturer, Fall 2014-Summer 2015.
UC Davis, Teaching Assistant and Instructor, Fall 2009-Spring 2013.
Education
Ph.D. in English Literature. University of California, Davis, 2009-2015.
Areas of Specialization: Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Culture (including the Victorian and Romantic periods), Digital Pedagogy, Narratology, Science and Technology.
Designated Emphasis: Critical Theory.
M.A. in English, University of Pittsburgh, 2009.
Areas of Specialization: Nineteenth-Century British Literature, Charles Dickens, and Book History.
Thesis: “Dickens and the English Reader: Fictional Narrative and National Circulation”
Thesis Chair: Stephen Carr.
B.A. in English magna cum laude, St. Mary’s College of Maryland, St. Mary’s, MD, 2006. Honors Thesis: “Standing in Front of History: The Modern Epic”
Dissertation
“Time and its Machine: The Novel as Temporal Technology,” examines Romantic and Victorian novels that engage the idea of time with metaphorical and literal machines. This pre-history of time machines reveals the variety of cultural sites caught up in mechanization and standardization, ranging from railroad travel to public education.
Committee Members: Elizabeth Carolyn Miller (Chair), Timothy Morton, Kathleen Frederickson
Publications
(Book Review). The Physics of Possibility. Michael Tondre. Victoriographies. (Spring 2019).
“The Circus and the Deadly Child: Ruptures of Social Code in Jude the Obscure.” Acta Neophilologica. 51.1 (Spring 2019): (forthcoming).
“Kingsley’s Chrono-Baby: Standardized Fictions of Class Time and Classed Bodies.”
Victorian Studies. 57.3 (Spring 2015): 387-94.
“The Image of Time in David Copperfield.” Dickens Studies Annual. 47 (Summer 2016): 87-105.
Under Consideration
“Conrad and the Identity of Time in The Secret Agent.” Conradiana. (Revising following a revise and resubmit)
“Frankens-Time: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the Origins of Artificial Intelligence.” Nineteenth-Century Literature. (Under Review).
Research and Creative Work in Other Media
“The Office Hour.” Podcast on Culture and Academia. Fall 2016-Fall 2018.
“Stories We Tell Our Robots.” Podcast on Narrative and Technology. Fall 2017-Fall 2018.
“World-building in Science Fiction”, and “Robots and A.I. in Our Own Image.” Podcast guest interviews on the Multicultural Sci-Fi Organization Podcast.
“EggHead.” A Webcomic on the adventures of an egg in the Digital Humanities.
“Frankenbot: The Inevitable Monstrosity of Artificial Life“, and “Back to the Future and Time Travel.” Blog Posts on Amplifier: Georgia Tech experts on current issues.
Honors, Grants, and Awards
2018 Georgia Tech Center for Teaching and Learning Thank a Teacher Commendation
2017 Class of 1940 CIOS Award for Teaching Effectiveness
2014 HArCS Graduate Summer Fellowship.
Summer 2013, 2014: UC Davis Department of English Dissertation Fellowship.
2012 Qualifying Exam: Awarded a Pass with Distinction.
Fall 2011: Honorable Mention, UC Davis Department of English David Noel Miller Scholarship Essay Prize for the Best English Graduate Student Essay—”The Image of Time in David Copperfield.”
Spring 2011: Nominated for the Outstanding Graduate Student Teacher Award.
Spring 2011 Preliminary Exam: Awarded a High Pass in the fields of Victorian Studies and Romanticism.
Fall 2010: Highest rated first-year UWP 1 instructor.
Teaching/Leadership Experience
At Georgia Institute of Technology
Lecturer, Fall 2017-2018, LMC 4701: Undergraduate Research Proposal Writing
Worked with students who have selected to do senior thesis projects to develop the framework for a successful proposal. Students organize annotated bibliographies, research genres, and develop work plans for completing a senior thesis.
Lecturer, Fall 2017-2018, LMC 4702: Undergraduate Thesis Writing
Executed the proposal developed in 4701 by entering professional field discourse with a project that deploys student research across a number of platforms, including article submissions to an undergraduate research journal, poster and power point presentations, as well as school and grant applications.
Instructor, Spring 2016, ENGL 1102: We, Robots?
Explored the literary origins of artificial life, ranging from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to Shirow Masamune’s Ghost in the Shell. Focused not only on the long history of communicating our love and fear of artificial beings, but also the proposition that artificial life, whether a character in a novel or a McDonald’s service robot, is also inherently a complex act of communication itself.
Instructor, Fall 2015, Spring 2016. ENGL 1101: What Time is Communication?
Featured the multimodal model of Georgia Tech’s WOVEN (Written, Oral, Visual, Electronic, Non-Verbal) philosophy on communication. Taking as its basic theme the idea that Time is built communicatively by discursive communities, we are exploring what it means to design in multiple historical genres across time and media. Taking texts such as The Declaration of Independence and Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” for templates, students are challenged to create contemporary social media declarations and modest proposal advertisements that seek to engage and change the world around them.
At St. Mary’s College of Maryland, Visiting Instructor, Fall 2014-Summer 2015
Instructor, Summer 2015. ENGL 390: Science Fiction in Literature and Media
Focused on patterns and major themes emerging from and translating across nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century science fiction by examining major statements in the field in literature from Mary Shelley to HG Wells to Shirow Masamune and Joon-ho Bong.
Instructor, Spring 2015. ENGL 355: Charles Dickens.
Surveyed a variety of Dickens’s works to create a cross-section of his life as author, editor, and metropolitan voyeur of the rapidly transforming Victorian culture. Explored various reading practices in the context of serial and magazine editions and examined the ways that Dickens pursued the creation of his own mythology.
Instructor, Spring 2015. ENGL 130: The Rise of the Machine
Examined ideas of machines and mechanism before and after the industrial revolution. In particular the class featured a number of texts using the various definitions of “machine” proposed by René Descartes and John Locke in opposition to the opinions of Charles Babbage and Karl Marx. Using these thinkers, students engaged works ranging from William Shakespeare’s Coriolanus (1605) to James Cameron’s The Terminator (1984).
Instructor, Spring 2015. ENGL 106: Monstrous Compositions.
Looked at error as a social and compositional phenomenon and touched on texts such as Lucille Clifton’s “Shapeshifter poems” and Stephen Crane’s The Monster in thinking through how we write monstrously and what it means when we write about monsters. Students were challenged to perform a number of writing tasks within the subject from personal narrative to social criticism.
Instructor, Fall 2014. ENGL 355: Victorian Time Machines.
Considered the pre-history and logic of time machines. The class drew heavily from my dissertation and followed the idea of mechanical time as it was popularly represented in novels by Charles Dickens, Lewis Carroll, William Morris, and HG Wells among others.
Instructor, Fall 2014. ENGL 101: Interpretations of Error in Composition.
Took as its center of gravity an extended commitment to the revision process. Within the first 4 weeks of the course, students wrote the two papers that they will spend the next 12 weeks revising using a number of different writing tools and practices. This version of the class focused largely on cultural misunderstanding and empathy.
At University of California, Davis
Instructor, Winter 2013. ENL 4: Technologies of Representation and Representations of Technology.
Analyzed the representations of machinery in various media from the outset of the industrial revolution to the present day. The course examined discourse surrounding contemporary advances in technology in parallel with 17th and 18th century philosophy concerning the nature of machines as a background to a set of texts ranging from Frankenstein to Blade Runner.
Instructor, Fall 2013, Spring 2013. ENL 3: Monstrous Compositions.
Looked at error as a social and compositional phenomena that touched on texts such as Lucille Clifton’s “Shapeshifter poems” and Stephen Crane’s The Monster in thinking through how we write monstrously and what it means when we write about monsters. Students were challenged to perform a number of writing tasks within the subject from personal narrative to social criticism.
Instructor, Summer 2012, Summer 2013. UWP 101: Advanced Composition.
Challenged students to approach a self-selected topic through a number of different writing techniques. These included constructing discipline specific adlibs and scaffolding literature reviews and annotated bibliographies towards a final research project.
Instructor, Fall 2011. ENL185B: Women’s Writing II.
Women’s writing II was an upper-level survey of nineteenth-century British women writers that dealt broadly with issues of technology, science, legislation, and the formation of the modern female subject.
Instructor, Fall 2011, Winter 2012, Spring 2012. UWP 1: Interpretations of Error in Composition.
Approached the UWP class by centering on the work of David Bartholomae and focusing students on the potentially productive role of error in writing.
Instructor, Winter 2011, Spring 2011. UWP 1: Argument, Voice, and Form.
Argument, Voice, and Form was a course designed by my colleague Ian Afflerbach and me that works within the UWP framework to get students to imagine all writing occurring within the context of rhetorical frames. The class depended on historically significant arguments to model approaches to persuasive writing.
Instructor, Fall 2010. UWP 1: Expository Writing.
An introductory writing course using the first quarter standard teaching parameters to push students to engage with their writing process and the difficulties of field-specific writing.
Lectures/Performance/Conference Presentations
NAVSA 2018, Looking Outwards, panel speaker, October 11-14, 2018,
“HG Wells’s The Time Machine as Visual Heuristic.”
Atlanta Sci-Fi Film Festival, panel speaker, October 9, 2016, Terrence Malick’s Voyage of Time.
BWWC 2016, Making a Scene, panel speaker, June 2-5, 2016,
“Mary Shelley’s Scenic Space-Time: The Narrative Construction of Polar Geography.”
NAVSA 2014, Victorian Classes and Classifications, panel speaker, November 13-15, 2014, “Kingsley’s Chrono-Baby: Standardized Fictions of Class Time and Classed Bodies.”
Invited Speaker at the St. Mary’s College of Maryland Faculty Seminar Senate Talks, October 20, 2014, “Alice’s Adventures in Standardized Education.”
Invited Speaker at Rice University Panel on Science, Time, and Temporality, March 14, 2013: “The Time Machine in Context.”
Loco/Motion: 34th Annual Conference of the Nineteenth Century Studies Association, panel speaker, March 7-9, 2013, “Building Machine Time: The Mechanization of Narrative Temporality in HG Wells’ Time Machine”
Rice University, Dickens Universe Spring Conference, panel speaker, March 30, 2011 “Ph-ph-phillotson: Interrupted speech and the problem of Code in Jude the Obscure”
UC Santa Cruz, Dickens Universe, workshop leader.
Professional Service
Service at the Georgia Institute of Technology
Podcast Committee Chair, Fall 2018-
As the chair of the podcast committee I am working on centralizing many of the podcasts emerging from Georgia Tech into a central clearinghouse site. I am also working on an “inaudible labor” project to begin working with Postdoctoral scholars to record conference presentations, job talks, and lectures as forms of intellectual production that can seek a broader audience.
Georgia Tech Virtual Reality Club, Faculty Advisor, Fall 2016-Spring 2017.
TechStyle Committee, Fall 2016-Spring 2017.
Contributed a weekly podcast “The Office Hour” and a weekly web comic “EggHead” as well as editorial work on a variety of material.
Assessment Committee, Fall 2015-Spring 2016.
On the assessment committee I worked with a team of colleagues to determine the most fruitful means of meeting Georgia’s state requirements for departmental oversight and observable implementation of the department’s central curriculum via an online portfolio system.
Podcast Committee, Spring 2016-2017.
As a member of the podcast committee, I worked to record, edit, and distribute content produced by the various members of the group. This included an original podcast “Failed Time Travelers” created in conjunction with my colleague, Andrew Marzoni.
Service at University of California, Davis
Editor of the English Department Newsletter, Spring 2014, 2015.
As editor of the department newsletter, I had to coordinate interviews and department overviews as well as gather the essential details and workings of the faculty and students from the preceding academic year such as new hires, awards, and publications.
Graduate Student Researcher, Winter 2014, English Department Chair Elizabeth Miller.
My central tasks as Professor Miller’s research assistant involved coordinating reading for her upcoming graduate course on realism and sensationalism as well as indexing all available Victorian reviews of the novels she was teaching in the class.
University Writing Program Liaison, Fall 2012-Spring 2013.
In my year as liaison between the University Writing Program and the English department, I coordinated class observations and supervision of beginning instructors with those who had taught the course repeatedly. I also held office hours to support in lesson planning and classroom management for new instructors.
Scholar’s Symposium Co-chair, Fall 2011-Spring 2012.
As co-chair I organized three conferences over the course of the year that represented work being produced in the department at various stages of academic development. This required coordinating paper calls, locations, speakers, and faculty respondents.