RLUK's Digital Shift Forum

From a book buyer’s perspective, print books nowadays seem very much like print books in 1950, or even 1900. What strategies can we use to foreground the profound changes that have taken place with the advent of digital technologies? This talk will introduce the concept of postprint and illustrate with examples from my most recent book, Postprint: Books and Becoming Computational. Topics include transitions in how academic presses view their work, how academic careers are changing shape as scholars move from (or between) books and scholarly websites, and changes within print technologies themselves.

N. Katherine Hayles is the Distinguished Research Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the James B. Duke Professor Emerita from Duke University. She researches the relations of literature, science and technology in the 20th and 21st centuries. Her twelve print books include Postprint: Books and Becoming Computational (Columbia, 2021), Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2017) and How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis (Univ. of Chicago Press 2015), in addition to over 100 peer-reviewed articles. Her books have won several prizes, including The Rene Wellek Award for the Best Book in Literary Theory for How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Literature, Cybernetics and Informatics, and the Suzanne Langer Award for Writing Machines. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is currently at work on Technosymbiosis: Futures of the Human.

Joining details

This event will be held via Zoom webinar. Attendees will be sent a joining link the day before the event and should ensure their email is entered correctly in the registration form. Attendees should check junk folders if no joining email is received.