N. Katherine Hayles

N. Katherine Hayles is the Hillis Professor of Literature, Distinguished Professor, Departments of English and Design/Media Arts at the University of California, Los Angeles. One of the foremost scholars of the relationship between literature and science in the late twentieth century, Hayles’ writing and research have focused on American postmodern literature, electronic textuality, posthumanism, technocriticism, electronic literature, hypertext and hypertext fiction. She is particularly concerned with the parallels between scientific models and literary theories as well as in contextualizing the interactions between humans and intelligent machines.

Among her books on the topic are How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics, which won the Rene Wellek Prize for the best book in literary theory for 1998-1999, My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts (2005), Nanoculture: Implications of the New Technoscience (ed.) (2004), and Writing Machines (2002). She has been the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships for her scholarship and teaching including the Suzanne Langer Award for Outstanding Scholarship, the Medal of Honor from the University of Helsinki, the Distinguished Scholar Award from the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts. In 2006, Hayles worked at the National Humanities Center as an ASC Fellow.