Thomas Augst

is a professor at New York University, where he teaches courses in American literature and culture.  He writes about the history of self-cultivation, media change, and changing forms of education in the United States, and is the author of The Clerk's Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-Century America.  He is coeditor of Institutions of Reading: The Social Life of Libraries in the United States, and coeditor of Libraries as Agencies of Culture.  A native of Berkeley California, he graduated summa cum laud from Yale College, earned his PhD from Harvard, and is recipient of fellowships from the U.S. Department of Education, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Since coming to NYU in 2007, he has served in a variety of administrative positions, including the Director of Graduate Studies and Chair of the Department of English, and been active in exploring new technologies for teaching and scholarship in higher education. He is the director of NewYorkScapes, a research collaborative using digital tools for place-based learning and cultural heritage discovery.