Joseph Paul Tabbi

 JOSEPH TABBI is an American academic and literary theorist who relocated to the University of Bergen in 2019. He has made significant contributions to the field of experimental American fiction in both print and electronic media. He is the author of Cognitive Fictions (2002) and Postmodern Sublime: Technology and American Writing from Mailer to Cyberpunk (1995). He was the first scholar granted access to the William Gaddis archives, and is the author of Nobody Grew but the Business: On the Life and Work of William Gaddis (2015). He edited The Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic Literature (2017), and Post-Digital: Dialogues and Debates from electronic book review (2020). He continues to co-edit the scholarly journal electronic book review (ebr), which he founded in the mid-1990s with Mark Amerika.

Tabbi is also a founding member and Director of the Consortium on Electronic Literature (CELL). A National Endowment for the Humanities grant (2014) enabled member literary databases worldwide to build a search engine for interoperability. An earlier, startup grant from the NEH, for the development of the Electronic Literature Directory, provided a model for later databases worldwide that are now a part of the Consortium. A “manifesto” for the project can be found at www.cellproject.net.