Megan Ward is a faculty member in the School of Writing, Literature, and Film and Director of the OSU Center for the Humanities and the Center for Material Cultures Research in Archaeology, Art, and Indigenous Studies. 

Professor Ward teaches courses on British literature from 1800 to the present, the history of the novel, and archival theory. Her research investigates how realist novels have influenced culture from the Victorian period to the present. Her first book, Seeming Human: Victorian Realist Characters and Artificial Intelligence (Ohio State UP, 2018) offers a new theory of realist character through the realist novel’s unexpected afterlife: the intelligent machine. She is currently writing a book of essays, Chatbots in Love, which explores how the human desire for intimacy has shaped the creation of AI - and why that desire has been left unfulfilled. 

Professor Ward's work on technology and realism has appeared or is forthcoming in edited collections such as AI Narratives and The Routledge Guide to Politics and Literature as well as journals such as New Literary History and Public Humanities. She is also Co-Editor of the Nineteenth-Century Data Collective and has published writing on the Victorian antecedents of contemporary culture for general audiences in The Atlantic, Wired, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.