Category Archives: Publication

Benjamin Markovits: Critical Essays Available for Pre-Order

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The first volume in my Contemporary Writers: Critical Essays series in its new home at Routledge is now available for pre-order! Edited by Michael Kalisch and featuring contributions from emerging and established scholars, Benjamin Markovits: Critical Essays provides fresh perspectives on Markovits’s place in the contemporary literary field, as well as offering a detailed survey of his work to date. It’s wonderful to see the first book in the new life of the series coming through. Do get in touch if you have an idea for a conference and collection in the series.

“The collection begins with Markovits’s early ‘campus novel’, The Syme Papers (2004), before exploring his celebrated ‘Byron Trilogy’, and the 2005 story-cycle, Either Side of Winter. Contributors consider Markovits’s best-known book, You Don’t Have to Live Like This, which won the James Tait Memorial Prize, as well as his more recent fictions focusing on the trials and tribulations of the Essinger family. Taken together, this authoritative collection brings to light the many preoccupations of Markovits’s singular oeuvre—from Byron to basketball, from race relations to real estate. It also includes a frank and wide-ranging interview with the author.”

New book Storylistening now published!

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I’ve been busy over the past few months doing a series of interviews, events and written pieces ahead of the publication of my new book Storylistening: Narrative Evidence and Public Reasoning, co-authored with Claire Craig. The book was published in mid-November and we launched it online at an event kindly hosted by the Bennett Institute for Public Policy at Cambridge. A recording of the launch, together with links to all the other things to watch, read or hear around the book, can be found on the book’s webpage. All of my Storylistening-related activities will be posted there, rather than here, so do check it out.

NEW BOOK PUBLISHED – AI Narratives: A History of Imaginative Thinking About Intelligent Machines (Oxford University Press)

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It never fails to be an exciting moment when a book that you have worked on for years finally meets the world. My co-edited book, AI Narratives: A History of Imaginative Thinking about Intelligent Machines, is now out with Oxford University Press. Mapping AI narratives from the classical era through through to the present, the collection examines how stories about AI anticipate, and can usefully inform, many contemporary debates about the social, ethical, political and philosophical consequences of AI. It was a pleasure to work with the contributors, from whom I learnt so much and who bring such a rich range of different expertise and methodological approaches to the topic.

CONTENTS

Introduction
Imagining AI, Stephen Cave, Kanta Dihal and Sarah Dillon

PART I – ANTIQUITY TO MODERNITY
1. Homer’s Intelligent Machines: AI in Antiquity, Genevieve Liveley and Sam Thomas
2. Demons and Devices: Artificial and Augmented Intelligence before AI, E. R. Truitt
3. The Android of Albertus Magnus: A Legend of Artificial Being, Minsoo Kang and Ben Halliburton
4. Artificial Slaves in the Renaissance and the Dangers of Independent Innovation, Kevin LaGrandeur
5. Making the Machine Speak: Hearing Artificial Voices in the Eighteenth Century, Julie Park
6. Victorian Fictions of Computational Creativity, Megan Ward
7. Machines Like Us? Modernism and the Question of the Robot, Paul March-Russell

PART II – MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY
8. Enslaved Minds: Artificial Intelligence, Slavery, and Revolt, Kanta Dihal
9. Machine Visions: Artificial Intelligence, Society, and Control, Will Slocombe
10. “A push-button type of thinking”: Automation, Cybernetics, and AI in Mid-century British Literature, Graham Matthews
11. Artificial Intelligence and the Parent/Child Narrative, Beth Singler
12. AI and Cyberpunk Networks, Anna McFarlane
13. AI: Artificial Immortality and Narratives of Mind-Uploading, Stephen Cave
14. Artificial Intelligence and the Sovereign-Governance Game, Sarah Dillon and Michael Dillon
15. The Measure of a Woman: Fembots, Fact and Fiction, Kate Devlin and Olivia Belton
16. The Fall and Rise of AI: Investigating AI Narratives with Computational Methods, Gabriel Recchia

NEW REPORT: AI and Gender: Four Proposals for Future Research

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Screen Shot 2019-09-22 at 21.35.19Back in February 2019, I organised a workshop on ‘AI and Gender’, held by the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, co-convened with the Ada Lovelance Institute, and supported by PwC. The workshop was trans-disciplinary and trans-sectoral. It gathered together scholars from a wide range of academic fields, including computer science, history, philosophy of science, law, politics, sociology, literature, and gender studies. In addition, it brought together researchers and practitioners from industry and research centres outside of academic, as well as key figures from UK AI governance and policy. Over the course of day, seventeen 10-minute talks created a wide and detailed picture of the cutting edge of current research and initiatives into AI and gender. They also created some agreement, some disagreement, a lot of conversation, and a quite phenomenal buzz.

We took advantage of that communal energy at the end of the day when, led by my research assistant Clementine Collett, we invited our participants to take part in a collective intelligence exercise. The challenge was to come up with at least three recommendations for new areas of research concerning AI and gender. The result was our report: ‘AI and Gender: Four Proposals for Future Research‘, which develops and augments the ideas shared during this exercise by drawing on content from the workshop presentations, questions, and discussions, as well as from a broad range of wider literature and research.

The report outlines four of the weightiest challenges to gender equality presented by recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI). In tandem, it outlines four research proposals which would effectively tackle these issues. The proposals are not intended to be prescriptive, but rather, provocative. The report aspires to use these proposals as a mechanism to raise awareness, summarise the current challenges, and prompt practical action. As we continue to see rapid development of AI systems, now is the moment to address the challenges which AI presents to gender equality. It scopes and situates current research and interventions, identifies where further research and intervention is required, and acts as a call to action to tackle issues of injustice.

We launched the report at CogX 2019 with a talk by Clemi and myself, followed by a panel discussion on AI and Gender. A video recording of the Cog X events can be seen here.

New Book Submitted: Deconstruction, Feminism, Film coming in 2018

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It’s been a momentous three months since my last post as at the end of September I submitted a book I’ve been thinking about and working on intermittently for over sixteen years. Over the past two years I’ve been able to pull together all that thinking, engage in sustained writing, and produce a book I am truly proud of: Deconstruction, Feminism, Film will be published by Edinburgh University Press in June 2018. It’s a special book to me for many reasons: it’s my first book that extends my work from literary studies into film; it addresses and finally puts to rest troubling philosophic questions about deconstruction that I’ve had since I was a PhD student; and it articulates my methodology as a feminist scholar. Most importantly, however, it is my first monograph since having my children. As any academic parent knows, the effect of having children on one’s career is enormous – it’s not just the actual weeks you take off for parental leave. If you carry the child, it’s the inability to concentrate in the final months of a pregnancy, or even throughout those nine months if one has a difficult pregnancy. It’s the chronic sleep deprivation that arrives with your first child, which, if they are not that mythical beast, ‘a good sleeper’, prevents all but the most basic functioning (and can do so, in my experience, for years). It’s the return to work as a different person, with a different set of commitments and an entirely different relationship to time. It’s all the conferences, invitations, after-hours seminars, international travel that are now mostly ruled out just as a matter of course, with the select few you choose to attend requiring careful and extensive planning. I have no complaints – I chose to have my children, I love them, and they are more important to me than any book. But the pride I feel in having produced Deconstruction, Feminism, Film as well as my babies is enormous. So for any academic parent out there struggling in those early years, doubting the possibility that they will ever read anything more advanced than a picture book again, let alone have the intellectual energy, time and space to WRITE a book again….keep the faith: you will be able to do it again, eventually.

Maggie Gee: Critical Essays Published

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Back in autumn 2012, when I was still up at St Andrews, Caroline Edwards and I held a hugely enjoyable and productive conference on author Maggie Gee, as part of my Gylphi Contemporary Writers book series. Three years later, after a job move each for Caroline and I, we couldn’t be more delighted to see the fruits of that conference and of the labour of us and our contributors, come to fruition. Maggie Gee: Critical Essays will be published on 5th October and is available for pre-order here. Even if we do say so ourselves, it’s a superb volume covering her key works as well as including a foreword by Maggie herself, as well as a copy of her previously uncollected lecture on literature, ‘How May I Speak in My Own Voice? Language and the Forbidden’.

9781780240336

After a few years gaining momentum the Gylphi Contemporary Writers Series has now hit full speed: China Miéville: Critical Essays, edited by Caroline Edwards and Tony Venezia, will be forthcoming in November, with titles on Tom McCarthy (whose novel Satin Island is shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2015), Adam Roberts and Rupert Thomson forthcoming in 2016.