David Cecchetto, associate professor of Critical Digital Theory in York University’s Department of Humanities, is co-editor of a new book series that will showcase interdisciplinary works in the arts, literature and science.

Proximities: Experiments in Nearness (University of Minnesota Press) is co-edited with Arielle Saiber, who is a professor of Romance Languages & Literatures at Bowdoin College in Maine.

Today, disciplines and fields move consciously proximate to one another, in conversation and growing together. Books in the Proximities series think proximately, that is, in disciplinary tandem, about the relationships within and between the arts, literature and science, as well as how scholarship can best be in active dialogue with communities and the world around us today, and in the future. The series not only thinks across disciplines, but thinks about the continuities and crossings themselves, interrogating how and why their disciplinary proximities matter.

Proximities publishes work that is crafted with nearness in mind: human nearness to one another and the world around us; nearness to one another’s thoughts; to our written and unwritten pasts; to critical trends and crises; to our futures ahead. This kind of scholarship powerfully catalyzes awareness of what it means to work interdisciplinarily by challenging assumptions about disciplinary thinking from the outside in, and the inside out.

This new series is presented in collaboration with the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts, an academic organization with members across disciplines, including the sciences, engineering, technology, computer science, medicine, the social sciences, the humanities and the arts. Cocchetto currently serves as president of the organization.

Cecchetto studies critical digital theory, sound and experimental media. He is an associate member of the graduate programs in Humanities and Film, as well as the York/Ryerson joint program in Communication & Culture; he is also a faculty associate with Sensorium: Centre for Digital Arts and Technology and co-organizes the Tuning Speculation conferences and workshops as part of The Occulture.

Cecchetto’s published works include the monographs Ludic Dreaming: How to Listen Away from Contemporary Technoculture (co-authored with The Occulture; Bloomsbury, 2017), Humanesis: Sound and Technological Posthumanism (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), and the forthcoming Listening in the Afterlife of Data (Duke University Press, 2022). In addition to Proximities, he is a series editor of the para-academic Catalyst book series (Noxious Sector Press).

Faculty members who are interested in submitting a proposal to Proximities can contact the editors at dcecchet@yorku.ca or asaiber@bowdoin.edu with a short description of your book project.

Courtesy of YFile.