Alex Reid

PhD

Alex Reid.

Alex Reid

PhD

Alex Reid

PhD

Research Areas

Media Theory, Digital Rhetoric, Posthumanism, Social Media, Media Infrastructure, Game Studies, Professional-Technical Communication, Digital Pedagogy

Education

PhD., English, SUNY Albany

Bio

For more than 20 years, Alex Reid has studied digital rhetoric and emerging media.  He employs posthuman and new materialist approaches to study how human expressive capacities arise through relations among our bodies, nonhumans, and our environment in processes that are interdependent but not deterministic. His 2007 book, The Two Virtuals: New Media and Composition, investigates VR and machine intelligence in relation to philosophical concepts of the virtual in Deleuze and elsewhere. Rhetorics of the Digital Nonhumanities(Southern Illinois UP, 2022) expands on this research and develops a new materialist, digital rhetorical method. There Reid studies softwarized procedural rhetorics, structures of synthetic attention, integrative assemblages of digital composing, and electrate collective experiments. His most recent publications address algorithmic culture, generative AI, and posthuman computer vision.

In his time at UB, Reid has taught courses on social media, media infrastructure, video games, media theory, professional-technical communication, and digital pedagogy. Before joining the Media Study department, Reid was a professor in UB’s English department where he served as director of composition and teaching fellows, overseeing the university writing program and mentoring graduate teaching assistants. He was appointed as an Open SUNY Online Ambassador for UB in 2020 in recognition for his work in online teaching.