“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Wednesday, July 20, 2011

Andrew Hageman has finished his dissertation

And I'm signing it today. This is a very happy time. Andrew is the third advisee within the year to finish.

Andrew's dissertation is called The Hour of the Machine. It combines painstaking archival research (including database research with statistical analysis) with posthumanist theory and good old close reading, to produce a remarkable document on the history and meanings of terms we throw around such as “wheels within wheels.” 

In the course of his research Andrew discovered some remarkable facts. It's also the case that he has literally read almost everything on machines in literature and culture, going several centuries back...

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