N. Katherine Hayles
Education
- B.S., Rochester Institute of Technology, Chemistry, 1966
- M.S., California Institute of Technology, Chemistry, 1969
- M.A., Michigan State University, English, 1970
- Ph.D., University of Rochester, English, 1977.
- She is currently Professor of English and Design/Media Arts at UCLA
Projects
Interests: Literature and science in the 20th and 21st century; 20th and 21st century American fiction; electronic textuality, hypertext fiction and theory; science fiction; literary theory, media theory.
She is currently working on two projects, a primer of electronic literature (under contract to the University of Notre Dame Press) and a study of narrative and database (under contract to the University of Chicao Press).
Among her other professional activities, Hayles has been President of the Society for Literature and Science and on the Executive Committee of the Modern Language Assoc. Literature and Science Division; the Editorial Board of Comparative Literature Studies; Board of Consultants, Science-Fiction Studies; Editorial Board of Configurations: A Journal for Literature, Science, and Technology; and Board of Directors of the Electronic Literature Organization.
Katherine Hayles' 1999 book, How We Became Posthuman, (besides being named one of the best 25 books of 1999 by Village Voice and was the winner of the Rene Wellek Prize for Best Book in Literary Theory for 1998-1999) is one of the paradigms of scholarship in Cyborg Anthropology. She traces the historical conditions that led to the birth of Cybernetics during the Macy Conferences and uses a variety of literary texts to reveal the legacy of Cybernetics/Informatics in our post-modern techno-human condition. An essential read for any scholar of Cyborg Anthropology. An excellent review by fellow scholar Erik Davis can be found here
Further Reading
- How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies In Cybernetics, Literature, And Informatics (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1999)
- My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts (University of Chicago Press, 2005)
- Writing Machines (MIT Press, 2002)
- Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science (Cornell Univ. Press, 1990)
- The Cosmic Web: Scientific Field Models and Literary Strategies in the Twentieth Century (Cornell Univ. Press, 1984)
External Links
Source and Hompage: N. Katherine Hayles
