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Conservation Research Institute

 

Biography

I studied for a BA and DPhil in English at Wadham College, Oxford from 1973 onwards, gaining my DPhil in 1980. I became Lecturer in English at Birkbeck College, London in 1980, where I was Professor of Modern Literature and Theory from 1994. From 2003 to 2012, I was Academic Director of the London Consortium Graduate Programme in Humanities and Cultural Studies. I have been Grace 2 Professor of English in Cambridge since 2012 and, since 2018, Director of CRASSH.

Research

My research interests usually have their rise in the literature and culture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, though most turn out to have a longer historical contour. My areas of interest include magical thinking; the history of medicine; the cultural life of objects and the material imagination; the relations between culture and science; the philosophy of animals; the body, sense and sexuality; literature, numbers and economics; literature and technology; the history of sound, voice and auditory media; the sociopragmatics of collective feeling and fantasy; and the developing field of psychosocioendocrinology. I have also written on contemporary art for CabinetTate EtcModern Painters and others, and broadcast for radio almost whenever I am asked. My most recent books are Dream Machines (2017), about the history of imaginary machines and mechanisms, which is part of the Technographies series I coedit for Open Humanities Press; and The Madness of Knowledge: On Wisdom, Ignorance and Fantasies of Knowing (Reaktion/University of Chicago Press, 2019), which is a psychopathology of intellectual life. Giving Way: Thoughts on Unappreciated Dispositions is forthcoming from Stanford University Press in October 2019. I am currently working on the life of Nathaniel Fairfax, a seventeenth-century physician and Royal Society correspondent, who was the author of A Treatise of the Bulk and Selvedge of the World (1674), and writing about begging and the pragmatics of petitionary acts.My research interests usually have their rise in the literature and culture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, though most turn out to have a longer historical contour. My areas of interest include magical thinking; the history of medicine; the cultural life of objects and the material imagination; the relations between culture and science; the philosophy of animals; the body, sense and sexuality; literature, numbers and economics; literature and technology; the history of sound, voice and auditory media; the sociopragmatics of collective feeling and fantasy; and the developing field of psychosocioendocrinology. I have also written on contemporary art for CabinetTate EtcModern Painters and others, and broadcast for radio almost whenever I am asked. My most recent books are Dream Machines (2017), about the history of imaginary machines and mechanisms, which is part of the Technographies series I coedit for Open Humanities Press; and The Madness of Knowledge: On Wisdom, Ignorance and Fantasies of Knowing (Reaktion/University of Chicago Press, 2019), which is a psychopathology of intellectual life. Giving Way: Thoughts on Unappreciated Dispositions is forthcoming from Stanford University Press in October 2019. I am currently working on the life of Nathaniel Fairfax, a seventeenth-century physician and Royal Society correspondent, who was the author of A Treatise of the Bulk and Selvedge of the World (1674), and writing about begging and the pragmatics of petitionary acts.

Publications

Key publications: 

Books

Beyond Words: Sobs, Hums, Stutters and Other Vocalizations (London: Reaktion/Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014)

Beckett, Modernism and the Material Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014)

Living By Numbers: In Defence of Quantity (London: Reaktion/Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016)

Dream Machines (London: Open Humanities Press, 2017)

The Madness of Knowledge: On Wisdom, Ignorance and Fantasies of Knowing (London: Reaktion/Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019)

Essays

'Rustications: Animals in the Urban Mix', in The Acoustic City, ed. Matthew Gandy and B.J. Nilsen (Berlin: Jovis, 2014), pp. 16-22

‘Spelling Things Out’, New Literary History, 45 (2014): 183-97

‘ “Was That a Point?” Beckett’s Punctuation’, in The Edinburgh Companion to Beckett and the Arts, ed. S.E. Gontarski (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), pp. 269-81

'Scilicet: Kittler, Media and Madness', in Kittler Now: Critical Perspectives in Kittler Studies, ed. Stephen Sale and Laura Salisbury (Cambridge and Malden MA: Polity, 2015), pp. 115-31

'Guys and Dolls'Women: A Cultural Review, 26 (2015): 129-41

‘Literature, Technology and the Senses’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature, ed. David Hillman and Ulrika Maude (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 177-96

‘Choralities’Twentieth-Century Music, 13 (2016): 3-23

'Vocus Pocus', in This Is A Voice: 64 Exercises to Train, Project and Harness the Power of Your Voice,  ed. Jeremy Fisher and Gillyanne Kayes (London: Profile, 2016), pp. 6-16

'Numbers It Is: The Musemathematics of Modernism', in Moving Modernisms: Motion, Technology, and Modernity, ed. David Bradshaw, Laura Marcus and Rebecca Roach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 98-109

'The Game of Work: Ai Weiwei and Wittgenstein', Ai Wewei: Cubes and Trees (Cambridge: Heong Gallery, Downing College, 2016), pp. 23-7

'Decomposing the Humanities', New Literary History, 47 (2016): 275-88

‘How To Do Things With Writing Machines’Writing, Medium, Machine: Modernist Technographies, ed. Sean Pryor and David Trotter (London: Open Humanities Press, 2016), pp. 18-34

'The Return of Finitude', Textual Practice, 30 (2016): 1165-6

‘Modernism After Postmodernism’, The Cambridge History of Modernism, ed Vincent Sherry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 820-34

'Two-step, Nerve-tap, Tanglefoot: Tapdance Typologies in Cinema', in Sounding Modernism: Rhythm and Sonic Mediation in Modern Literature and Film, ed. Julian Murphet, Helen Groth and Penelope Hone (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), pp. 211-27

 'Acousmanie' [in French], trans. Marie Verry, in Max Feed: Oeuvre et héritage, ed. Daniele Balit, special issue hors-série, Revue d'ailleurs (Besançon) (2018), 67-72

'Unwired', Dirty Furniture. 4 (2018): 136-43

'Telling the Future', Cabinet, 65 (2018): 69-71

‘Parables of the Para-’, in Parasites: Exploitation and Interference in French Thought and Culture, ed. Matt Phillips and Tomas Weber (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2018), pp. 13-29

'The Matter of Beckett's Facts', Journal of Beckett Studies, 28 (2019): 5-18

‘Imaginary Energies: The Arts of Perpetuity’, in Energies in the Arts, ed. Douglas Kahn (Cambridge MA and London: MIT Press, 2019), pp. 57-85

Director of CRASSH
Grace 2 Professor of English
Professor Stephen  Connor

Affiliations