On Monday March 7, 2016 the renowned scholar and author N. Katherine Hayles will visit UCA and give a lecture titled “Non-Conscious Cognition and the Digital Humanities” at 7 p.m. in the Doyne Health Science Center Auditorium. The lecture is free and open to the public, and will be followed by a reception. Dr. Hayles is the 2016 Norb and Carol Schedler Scholar in Residence.
Professor of Literature at Duke University, Hayles is the author of several books, including the groundbreaking How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (1999) and How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis (2012). Her work has been honored with the René Wellek Prize for literary theory and the Suzanne Langer Award for outstanding scholarship. Hayles is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two NEH Fellowships, a Rockefeller Residential Fellowship at Bellagio, and a fellowship at the National Humanities Center, among other awards and recognitions.
Her talk at UCA will focus on recent research in neuroscience that has revealed a level of neuronal processing inaccessible to consciousness, yet performing essential functions such as fast information processing, recognizing patterns too subtle and complex for consciousness to see, and integrating bodily markers into coherent body representations. These findings about human nonconscious cognition suggest strong parallels with technical cognition, catalyzing a reassessment of how we understand and view the digital humanities.
Dr. Taine Duncan, director of UCA’s Gender Studies program, commented: “Katherine Hayles’ How We Became Posthuman radically changed the way I think about the interaction between the virtual, material, and human worlds. Her research has continued to inspire my own work on issues of feminism in posthumanist studies, and to demonstrate how important it is to use interdisciplinary research.”
Hayles’ lecture is part of the Norbert and Carol Schedler Scholar in Residence program, supported by the Norbert and Carol Schedler Endowment and sponsored by the Schedler Honors College and the Department of Philosophy and Religion at UCA. This event is also being co-sponsored this year by the UCA College of Liberal Arts, the Gender Studies Program, and the Department of History.
