Cogut Institute for the Humanities

Lucia Kan-Sperling ’24 is an undergraduate concentrating in modern culture and media and English literature. Her honors thesis, tentatively titled “Digital/Reading/Writing in the Poetry of Tan Lin,” investigates the poetics of a co-constituting relationship between language, technology, and subjectivity. Reading the work of contemporary poet Tan Lin through theories of ambience, cybernetics, and digital structures, the project seeks to outline how Lin evokes a formal reading practice that posits a relationship to “text” as a prosthetic digital technology. Kan-Sperling enjoys writing and making artwork in various media, with a special interest in time-based forms such as video and video installation.

She graduated in spring 2024 magna cum laude, with honors from the Department of Modern Culture and Media. She also received the Preston Gurney Literary Prize in Cultural Criticism from the Department of English and for two years received the department’s Barbara Banks Brodsky Prize for Excellence in Real-World Writing. She was awarded a Huayu Enrichment Scholarship by the Taiwan Ministry of Education to continue her studies in Taiwan in 2024–25..