Contemporary Writers: Critical Essays

After over a decade of successful collaboration with the ground-breaking independent publisher Gylphi, in 2023 the Contemporary Writers: Critical Essays series moved to a new home at Routledge (the combined pressures of Brexit and the pandemic hitting small publishers too hard). The first ten volumes in the Series remain with Gylphi, but all new volumes will be with Routledge. The Contemporary Writers: Critical Essays series has pioneered a unique approach to the academic study of living authors and its model remains the same with Routledge. The titles in the series are devoted to contemporary Anglophone writers whose work is popularly and critically valued but on whom a significant body of academic criticism has yet to be established. Each volume develops out of the best contributions to an international academic conference, which the writer attends; represents the most intelligent and provocative material in current thinking about the writer’s work; and suggests future avenues of thought, comparison and analysis. With each title prefaced by an author Foreword, the series embraces the challenges of writing on living authors and provides the foundation stones for future critical work on our most significant contemporary writers.

Histories of Artificial Intelligence: A Genealogy of Power

From Spring 2020 to December 2021, I was part of the organising team of an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar on the histories of AI. The Mellon Foundation’s Sawyer Seminars were established in 1994 to provide support for comparative research on the historical and cultural sources of contemporary developments. Over the course of our Seminar, we hosted over 150 hours of reading groups, methods and critical issue training sessions, and community research sessions, with presenters and participants from across the globe. It was a vital and vibrant if (necessarily virtual) Seminar that was lifeline for many of us intellectually and socially during the dark days of the pandemic. All our activities are archived on the project website here. The HOAI special issue in BJHS Themes will be published in full by the end of 2023, with some articles already available on FirstView.