Grace Dignazio is an interdisciplinary scholar and MFA candidate in Creative Writing at The New School in New York City. Her digital humanities research focuses on hybrid poetics, electronic literature, and the intersections of technology and desire. Her writing has appeared in Public Seminar, LIT Magazine, The Inquisitive Eater, and The Blunt Space, among others. She is also a member of The New School’s SexTech Lab, where she researches AI companionship and digital intimacy.
Why did you apply to HASTAC Scholars?
I applied to the HASTAC Scholars fellowship program to connect with an interdisciplinary community of scholars rethinking traditional pedagogies and siloed modes of academic inquiry. Given my interests across the humanities and social sciences, I was especially drawn to HASTAC’s commitment to cultivating hybrid literacies and digital humanities praxis. Looking ahead, I believe collaborative research across disciplines is essential to constructing more innovative and equitable models of scholarship. HASTAC’s global network offers a platform for engaging with educators and scholars already advancing this work in substantive ways.
What are you currently working on, and what do you hope to accomplish with it?
As a graduate student researcher at The New School, I work in the nascent field of hybrid poetics, a mode of art-making that collapses boundaries of poetic form and medium to produce uncategorizable, genre-troubling artifacts. Drawing on methodologies from decolonial studies, philosophy and ecopoetics, I am developing a critical essay examining how fractured poetic forms register structural damage while opening non-restorative possibilities for artistic practice. By asserting contamination as a formal condition rather than an aesthetic choice, this project reframes hybridity as an adaptive, non-teleological response to the violences of colonialism and global environmental devastation. In doing so, I hope to contribute to contemporary debates in hybrid poetics and ecocriticism by offering a model for reading form as a site of ethical relation, shaped by harm and resistant to closure.
What are some things you wish you had known before graduate school (or before entering your current field)?
As an undergraduate, I attended a liberal arts college that emphasized interdisciplinary scholarship, but I often imagined it as occurring at the intersection of just two fields. Graduate school has fractalized that dyadic view, recasting my conception of interdisciplinarity into something more dynamic, slippery and expansive. While I wish I had realized earlier that interdisciplinarity can be far more radical than the meeting of two specializations, it has been invigorating as an artist to integrate hybridity into my practice and to pursue research that draws on a wide array of methodologies and discourses.
How does digital scholarship fit into your research, teaching, or activism?
Digital scholarship is central to my research and creative practice, providing both the methods and frameworks through which I explore the nexuses of poetry, technology and human experience. Now in the final semester of my MFA in Creative Writing, I am developing my thesis manuscript, Machine Love, a work of hypertext that maps speculative networks of desire. The project envisions digital poetry as a conduit for engaging with assemblages beyond the self, (social, virtual, multispecies), exploring what it means to be human in a technologically mediated world. Drawing on digital humanities methods, Machine Love treats interface and algorithmic processes as literary and cultural texts, situating contemporary generative and interactive poetry within transhistorical lineages of ecstatic and hybrid poetics, from medieval mystics to early hyperfiction pioneers.
What are you currently reading, watching, or listening to?
Listening to DJ_Dave, Charli xcx, ROSALÍA, Caroline Polachek, Amaarae, FKA twigs, Sophia Stel, Oklou, horsegiirL, ADÉLA, Danny L Harle… I could go on. 🎧💖
I just finished reading Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Clarice Lispector’s The Hour of the Star, Maggie Nelson’s Bluets. I’m halfway through Frank Wedekind’s novella, Mine-Haha. Margo Glantz’s Apparitions and Madeline Cash’s Lost Lambs are on the horizon.
What do you want to do after you graduate?
Now in the final semester of my MFA program in Creative Writing, I hope to continue my scholarship as a PhD candidate in the Fall.