WHERE

I have taught at the University of Sussex since 2013, where I became the University's first Professor in Digital Humanities in 2016. I have held visiting positions at institutions including Copenhagen Business School (Otto Mønsted Visiting Professorship in Artificial Intelligence, 2026), King's College London, Vita-Salute San Raffaele University (Italy), Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften at Goethe University Frankfurt, and the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Oslo, and Southern California. I co-founded and co-directed the Sussex Humanities Lab, a £3 million strategic programme in digital humanities.

WHAT

I teach modules on the MA Digital Media, MA Social and Political Thought, and BA Media and Communications. My teaching covers vector theory and critical AI, critical digital humanities, software studies, critical code studies, algorithms, philosophy of technology, and critical university studies. I work with students to explore how computational systems shape knowledge, power, and social organisation, and how we might develop practices of critical reason in relation to these technologies. I am also interested in the history and philosophy of the plateglass universities, especially the University of Sussex.

WHY

My current programme centres on what I call vector theory, a theory of how artificial intelligence, organised around trained high-dimensional geometries, is reshaping the production of knowledge and the political economy of computation, and flows into teaching that gives students a vocabulary for thinking critically about contemporary AI systems

Computation now penetrates virtually every domain of contemporary life, from arts and humanities practice to political and economic structures. Understanding how algorithms, software, and artificial intelligence systems work is not merely a technical matter but a question of power, knowledge, and critique. My work seeks to provide students with the theoretical and methodological tools, such as political economy, to interrogate these systems, to understand how they are legitimated, and to develop capacities for immanent critique.

I am particularly interested in the possibility of explainability and interpretability as practices of critical reason. Questions about computation are not settled, they re-form with each new architecture and each new system, and require innovative approaches to concept creation and theoretical work. Working with research students to develop critical and theoretical approaches to these questions is central to my approach.

Alongside this, I work on the historical genealogies of artificial intelligence, particularly through the rediscovery of the source code for ELIZA, the first chatbot, which had been lost for over fifty years, published as Inventing ELIZA: How the First Chatbot Shaped the Future of AI (MIT Press). This work connects historical questions about computation and intelligence to contemporary concerns about bias, transparency, and trust in AI systems. I am also interested in the history and philosophy of the university, examining how universities have become increasingly organised according to instrumental logics drawn from corporate structures, and how we might recover and reinvigorate the idea of the university as a space for critical thought and democratic culture.

PhD SUPERVISION

I am keen to supervise PhD students in the fields of computational media, critical digital humanities, software studies, digital media, philosophy of the university, critical theory, digital humanism, the politics of AI alignment, explainability, and media theory. I am particularly interested in receiving doctoral proposals that combine theoretical and philosophical work with digital studies in innovative ways.

Current doctoral students are studying:

• Computational Capitalism: The Political Economy of Synthetic Media and Algorithmic Value Extraction (with Dr BL Roberts)
• Critical Theory and Transformations of Work in the Age of Platforms: Ethical and Political Challenges (with Prof D Schecter)
• Synthetic Mediations: Mapping the Anti-Hermeneutic and Post-Ideological Structure of Automated Communications in the Digital Public Sphere (with Prof D Schecter)
• A Critique of Public Sphere in Chinese Social Media and its relationship with Chinese Mainstream Media and Public Opinion (with Dr Sally Chen)
• Authoritarian Intelligence: The role of AI and big data in enabling political and social control (with Dr T Kant)
• Temporal Enclosures in the Digital Milieu (with Prof KS O'Riordan)

Past doctoral students include:

• Free and Open Hardware: A Critical and Thematic Analysis of Free and Open Hardware Communities RepRap and Arduino (with Dr BL Roberts)
• Distant sonification: A critical computational method for sonic analysis of digital data (with Prof T Magnusson)
• The Network A Priori: Mapping New Ideological Constellations Under Conditions of Computational Capitalism (with Prof D Schecter)