Distinguished Research Professor
University of California, Los Angeles

James B. Duke Distinguished Professor Emerita
Duke University

N. Katherine Hayles teaches and writes on the relations of literature, science and technology in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Her academic training in chemistry and English literature is evident from her most recent monograph, Bacteria to AI: Human Futures with our Nonhuman Symbionts (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2025). For Hayles’ book, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (UChicago Press, 1999), she was awarded the René Wellek Prize for Best Book in Literary Theory by the American Comparative Literature Association and the Eaton Award for the Best Book in Science Fiction Theory and Criticism. Writing Machines (MIT Press, 2002) won the Suzanne Langer Award for Outstanding Scholarship, and Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary (Notre Dame Press, 2008) are both credited for establishing the notion of electronic textuality and providing the underpinning for the field of born-digital literature, respectively. Other books by her include, Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious (UChicago Press, 2017) and Postprint: Books and Becoming Computational (Columbia Univ. Press, 2021).

N. Katherine Hayles has published over 100 book chapters and journal articles covering a wide range of topics from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity Rainbow; to chaos theory, postmodernism, and gender; to textuality, narrative, and virtuality; to cognition, brain imaging, and machine reading. They have contributed to a body of work that has focused on literature, science, and technology; electronic textuality; modern and postmodern fiction; and science fiction and criticism. During her career, she has produced online resources and creative works including the blog Convergences where she posted on topics relating to literature, media, science, and technology; speculat1ons.net, an alternate reality game co-authored with Patrick Jagoda and Patrick LeMieux; and the companion site for her book, How We Think (UChicago Press, 1999). Hayles is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and Academia Europaea, as well as a recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship.

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