English and Anthropology Majors | McMurtry College

Max Scholl is a junior at Lovett College majoring in English and Anthropology and minoring in French Studies. His research sits at the juncture of literary theory and science and technology studies, with a particular focus on how aesthetic forms explore mutating regimes of technology, knowledge-production, and political economy. 

Thanks to support from the Moody Fellowship, he conducted research on technological mediation and literary imaginations of the desert under the supervision of Professor Timothy Morton (Department of English). Studying the works of Martin Heidegger and visiting the land art of Michael Heizer allowed him to complicate Lacan’s theory of the 'scopic drive’ in terms of how the desert’s ineffability is mediated by visual technologies: the telescope, the missile range, and the automobile. The research he conducted with Professor Morton will serve as the basis for his English senior thesis, which will focus on the aesthetics of absence and disappearance. 

Max is also a member of the National Humanities Leadership Council. 

Research interests: aesthetic mediation and the visual field, slow cinema, the Enlightenment and its outliers, absence and nothingness, limits and transgression.