Bruce Clarke

“The New Earth and Its Universe”
FRIDAY, APRIL 20 • 8:45a

Bruce Clarke’s research focuses on 19th- and 20th-century literature and science, with special interests in systems theory, narrative theory, and ecology. He is co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Posthuman (with Manuela Rossini, Cambridge Univ. Press, 2017); Routledge Companion to Literature and Science (with Manuela Rossini, Routledge, 2010); and Emergence and Embodiment: New Essays in Second-Order Systems Theory (with Mark B. N. Hansen, Duke Univ. Press, 2009), and editor of Earth, Life, and System: Evolution and Ecology on a Gaian Planet (Fordham Univ. Press, 2015). Clarke is also author of many books including: Neocybernetics and Narrative (Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2014); Posthuman Metamorphosis: Narrative and Systems (Fordham Univ. Press, 2008); and Energy Forms: Allegory and Science in the Era of Classical Thermodynamics (Univ. of Michigan Press, 2001).

His essays and book chapters have addressed evolutionary equality, neocybernetic posthumanism, autopoiesis and the planet, and steps to an ecology of systems, including “Mediating Gaia: Literature, Space, and Cybernetics in the Dissemination of Gaia Discourse” (Columbia Univ. Press, 2017), “Rethinking Gaia: Stengers, Latour, Margulis” (Theory, Culture & Society, 2017), and “Gaming the Trace: Systems Theory for Comparative Literature” (The Comparatist, 2013). He is currently an advisor to the European Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts. In 2010-11, he was Senior Fellow at the International Research Institute for Cultural Technologies and Media Philosophy, Bauhaus-University Weimar, and in 2015, he was Senior Fellow at the Center for Literature and the Natural Sciences, Friedrich Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg. He co-edits the book series Meaning Systems with Henry Sussman, published by Fordham University Press, and is a trustee of the American Society for Cybernetics.