Joanne T. Dempsey Memorial Lecture: N. Katherine Hayles - Can Computers Create Meaning?

Can Computers Create Meaning?: A Cyber/Bio/Semiotic Perspective

A world-renowned scholar and pioneering figure in the Digital Humanities, Dr. N. Katherine Hayles is James B. Duke Professor Emerita of Literature at Duke University and Distinguished Research Professor at UCLA. She has published a wide array of influential texts that draw together contemporary literary theory and scientific models as a way to delve into the relations of literature, science, and technology in the 20th and 21st centuries. Her theorization of the posthuman subject, "embodiment," digital and electronic literature, and cybernetics in particular has garnered wide critical acclaim. Her major publications include Writing Machines (2002), My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts (2005), Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary (2008), How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis  (2012), and, most recently, Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious (2017). She is also the recipient of the prestigious René Wellek Prize for Best Book in Literary Theory (How We Became Posthuman [1999]) as well as the Susanne K. Langer Award for Outstanding Scholarship (Writing Machines [2002]).

Created in memory of late USD Professor of English Joanne Dempsey, this biannual lecture series brings renowned literary scholars to the University of San Diego community.

This Joanne T. Dempsey Memorial Lecture is presented in collaboration with the Digital Humanities Colloquia Series, and co-sponsored by the Department of English and the Humanities Center.

Free and open to the public. For driving directions, visit www.sandiego.edu/maps.