Katherine Hayles
N. Katherine Hayles (US) is a postmodern literary critic, combining scientific insights from chaos and systems theory with the literary history of the twentieth century.
Katherine Hayles [1998 © Jan Sprij]
N. Katherine Hayles is Professor in the Literature Program at Duke University. She has a background in Chemistry (MS) and English (PhD); she worked as chemical research consultant before shifting fields to English Literature. Her focus is the relationship between science, literature and technology.
Her interests include 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, and media theory.
Her past teaching positions include Professor of English at UCLA, and faculty director of the Electronic Literature Organization (2001-2006), that focuses on facilitating electronic literature: http://eliterature.org/.
Hayles is the author of numerous books, including How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics (1999), in which she puts forward a proposition for the posthuman condition, exploring the relationship between changing modes of representation in contemporary literature and electronic writing, for which she won the Rene Wellek Prize: http://online.itp.ucsb.edu/online/colloq/hayles1/
Her interview with Arjen Mulder How does is feel to be posthuman? was published in V2_'s The Art of the Accident (1998).
Her latest publications are Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary (2008), a primer of electronic literature; My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts (2005); Nanoculture: Implications of the New Technoscience (ed.) (2004).
Hayles has won numerous prestigious awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rockefeller Residential Fellowship, and two Presidential Research Fellowships from the University of California.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N._Katherine_Hayles
http://www.english.ucla.edu/faculty/hayles/
