Petra McGillen receives promotion, research awards

In the spring of 2020, the Trustees of Dartmouth promoted Professor Petra McGillen to the Rank of Associate Professor with tenure. She additionally received the Karen E. Wetterhahn Memorial Award for Distinguished Creative or Scholarly Achievement, as well as the David Bloom and Leslie Chao Fellowship, which provides supplementary research support during the coming year.

In describing her work, she writes, "I am a media historian and scholar of German literature of the nineteenth century, and I specialize in material histories of creativity and knowledge production. Broadly speaking, I investigate what writers do with media technologies, and what media technologies do with writers—it makes a big difference for the creative process whether you put your ideas down in a notebook, on a typewriter, or in a database. My current book project explores the writing practices and media technologies that nineteenth-century journalists in the US, England, and Germany used in the production of fake news. At the time, fakery was very common; journalists routinely feigned the eyewitness's perspective, manipulated images, and fabricated quotations. Their motives, however, were often very sincere, and they honestly believed that there was such a thing as 'good fakery,' which is completely counter-intuitive from today's perspective. I love bringing these counter-intuitive discoveries from my research into the classroom. It's a great way to get a discussion started that makes the sparks fly and to introduce some much-needed critical distance to the media landscape of our own time."