Dan Keane

Dan is writing a series of nonfiction essays about expat life that explore our sense of place in online spaces.

Commenced 2023

Dan Keane is an American writer living in the Wairarapa. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in North & South, The Washington Post, Harper's, McSweeney's, Zoetrope: All-Story, ChinaFile, The Austin Chronicle, ArtForum, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading, among others. He taught writing at NYU Shanghai, holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the Helen Zell Writers' Program at the University of Michigan, and was formerly Bolivia correspondent for The Associated Press. He writes the newsletter american.nz.

Dan writes: 'I'm interested in the question of place in online writing, particularly among the quickly growing community of self-identified "expat" writers on Substack. For the creative portion of the PhD, I'm writing a Substack documenting my own expat experience here in New Zealand, experimenting in subject and voice while building an audience across New Zealand, the United States, and fellow expats around the world. For the critical portion, I'll closely read a selection of the platform's expat writers to study their narratives of place and national identity. How do these writers locate themselves in an ever more mobile and connected world? How does Substack's new model of social media shape our sense of self, place, and nation? When we all live on our phones, what is a letter home?'

Read more