About

Micah Bateman is an information theorist of textual culture whose work examines how literary forms and cultural texts circulate, aggregate, and acquire meaning within archives, platforms, and AI systems. His research spans library and information science, media theory, and literary studies, with a focus on how poems and other texts function as information objects under conditions of scale.

He is currently supported by a grant from the Institute of Museum & Library Services investigating strategies for coordinating community memory across rural archival networks. His book project, Lyric Publics, traces how poems and poets are recirculated through social media during moments of political crisis, developing concepts such as the “crisis canon” and “secondary lyricization” to describe the transformation of literary texts into shared cultural resources.

Bateman’s work engages archives ranging from small community collections to large-scale digital platforms, asking how infrastructures of preservation, discovery, and generation shape contemporary cultural expression. In parallel with his scholarly work, he is an award-winning essayist and poet. His essay “Son of Batman” was a finalist for The Iowa Review Award in Nonfiction and the Hunger Mountain Creative Nonfiction Prize, and his poem “Poem Half Aubade Half Nocturne” received the Poetry Society of America’s Lyric Poetry Award.

 Appointments

Assistant Professor, School of Library and Information Science, University of Iowa, 2022-present; Lecturer, 2020-2022

UI Provost AI Fellow, 2026-2028

Co-Chair, DH in Lib* SIG, Association for Computing and the Humanities (ACH), 2025-present

Member, Information Technology Advisory Committee, University of Iowa, 2022-present

Member, Walt Whitman Archive advisory board, 2022-present

Member, Virtual Writing University advisory board, Graduate College, University of Iowa, 2022-present

Member, Public Digital Humanities Certificate Program, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, University of Iowa, 2022-present

Poetry Editor, River Styx, 2023-2024; Contributing Editor, 2023-present

Fellow, Andrew W. Mellon Engaged Scholar Initiative, College of Liberal Arts, University of Texas at Austin, 2019-2020

Digital Collections Services Assistant, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, 2019-2020

Assistant Director, New Writers Project MFA Program, Department of English, University of Texas at Austin, 2017-2019

Visiting Writer, Department of English, University of Iowa, 2011-2012

Coordinator of Student and Alumni Relations, Alumni and Development, Washington University in St. Louis, 2008-2009

 Education

Degrees

Ph.D. English, University of Texas at Austin, 2021

M.A. Library and Information Science, University of Iowa, 2015

M.F.A. Poetry, Iowa Writers' Workshop, 2011

B.A. English, Washington University in St. Louis, 2007

Certifications

Design4Online, University of Iowa, 2022

Inclusive Classrooms Leadership, University of Texas at Austin, 2021