Melissa Monique Littlefield

Melissa Littlefield works at the intersections of technology and culture, focusing on the ways that technological solutions are often proposed for invented and imagined “problems.” She particularly enjoys intersections between technologies, popular media, and science fiction. In the past couple of decades, Littlefield worked in the forensic sciences and neurosciences, focusing on technologies such as lie detection, fMRI, and EEG; she’s now turning her attention to chemistry and textiles with a new book project about the ways that wool textiles became a mid-century American problem in need of technological and chemical solutions.

Originally trained as a Literature and Science scholar at Penn State, her scholarship often intersects with Science and Technology Studies. Littlefield’s first book, The Lying Brain: Lie Detection in Science and Science Fiction (University of Michigan Press, 2011) is a socio-cultural history of mechanical lie detection and its relationship to the emergent, neuroscientific research on the neural correlates of deception. Her second book, Instrumental Intimacy: EEG Wearables and Neuroscientific Control concerns the emergence of mobile, user-centered EEG devices and the popular and scientific discourses that fuel their distribution and use. She is also the co-editor (with Jenell Johnson) of The Neuroscientific Turn: Transdisciplinarity in the Age of the Brain (University of Michigan Press, 2012); and co-editor (with Rex Ferguson and James Purdon) of The Art of Identification: Forensics, Surveillance, Identity (Penn State UP, 2021).

From 2006 to 2019, Littlefield was jointly appointed in the Departments of English and Kinesiology and Community Health. She is affiliated with the Beckman Institute for Advanced Technology and the Writing Studies Program and served as the Program Leader for the Neuro Cultures INTERSECT Graduate Training Program (2012-2014). Since 2013, Littlefield has co-edited (w/ Rajani Sudan) the Society for Literature and Science’s journal, Configurations. Her essays can be found in journals such as Frontiers in Human Neuroscience; Social Studies of Science; Science, Technology & Human Values; Advances in Medical Sociology; Crime, Media Culture; and in several edited collections, including Andrew Shail and Laura Salisbury’s collection, Neurology and Modernity: A Cultural History of Nervous Systems, 1885-1950.