Alexander Starre is Post-Doctoral Research Associate at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at the Free University Berlin, where he works in American cultural history, practices of knowledge creation, media theory, and print culture. He received his Ph.D. in American Studies in 2012 from the University of Göttingen with a dissertation on textual materiality in contemporary American literature. His first book Metamedia: American Book Fictions and Literary Print Culture after Digitization is forthcoming with the University of Iowa Press. His recent publications include book chapters and journal articles on the work of Mark Z. Danielewski, Dave Eggers, and Chris Ware. He is in the research stage of a new book project tentatively titled "Knowledge Cultures: Shapes, Styles, and Traces of Intellect in Professionalized America, 1878-1929." For this second monograph, he currently explores Andrew Carnegie's public library program and the competing ideas of knowledge in Willa Cather's novels.