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American Academy of Arts and Sciences and Academy of Europe member; René Wellek Prize,
Academic background
Education
BS, chemistry, Rochester Institute of Technology (1966); MS chemistry, California Institute of Technology (1969); MA English Literature, Michigan State University, PhD English literature, University of Rochester (1977)
Social and literary critic,specializing in relations between science,literature,and technology
Notable works
How We Became Posthuman (1999),Writing Machines (2002),How We Think (2012),Unthought (2017),Bacteria to AI (2025)
Nancy Katherine Hayles (born 1943) is an American literary critic,most notable for her contribution to the fields of literature and science,electronic literature,and American literature. Her scholarship primarily focuses on the "relations between science,literature,and technology".[1][2] Beginning in the 1970s through 2025,Hayles has examined how humans interact with technology and media.[3] She explores how digital technologies affect humanities research.[4] As of March 2025,she is currently a Distinguished Research Professor at the University of California,Los Angeles[5] and the James B. Duke Professor Emerita from Duke University.[6][5]
She married William Hayles,July 26,1969 (marriage ended,1979) and had two children:Lynn Hayles Rathjen and Jonathan Hayles. She later married Nicholas Gessler,August 6,1994.[11]
Career
After earning her PhD,Hayles taught as at Dartmouth College an instructor (1975–76) and then as an assistant professor English (1976–1982). She then moved to the University of Missouri—Rolla,as an assistant professor of English (1982–85) and from there to the University of Iowa,where she taught as an associate professor,(1985–89) and as the Millington F. Carpenter Professor of English (1989–92).Hayles then became the Hillis Professor of Literature in English and Media Arts at the University of California,Los Angeles (UCLA) (1992–2008).[11][12] After this distinguished professorship,she moved to Duke University and was a professor of English and Literature at (1992–2018),when she retired as the James B. Duke Distinguished Professor Emerita of Literature.[13] She then returned to UCLA,where she has held an appointment as Distinguished Research Professor of English from 2018.[5]
In addition to her faculty positions,Hayles has been a visiting scholar,including the California Institute of Technology,Pasadena,visiting associate,(1979–80) and visiting associate professor,(1988);Tulane University,New Orleans,LA,Mellon distinguished visiting professor (1994).[11]
This seminal book explains how the lines between human and technology are blurring.[17] Hayles traces the history of cybernetics and technology, helping to define and introduce the term "posthuman."[17]
Writing Machines
This 2002 work explores the literary dimensions of new media.[18] This work introduces "first-, second- and third-generations hypertexts, or technotexts" as Hayles terms them.[19]Grigar quotes Hayles to summarize that "thus, Writing Machines is not just about electronic texts produced in these days of post-humanity, but also 'what the print book can be in the digital age'".[20] Hayles argues that cyberculture should "help us rethink the relationships between form and content, more specifically between the material aspects of the medium used and the generated content".[21] Symons claims that "Hayles argues that a text's instantiation in a particular medium shapes it in ways that cannot be divorced from the meaning of its "words (and other semiotic components)".[22] This print book itself is designed as a technotext.[20] As Koskimaa described in Electronic Book Review, "Writing Machines is the second release in The MIT Press's new Mediawork Pamphlet Series, which pairs leading writers and contemporary designers to produce pamphlets involving emergent technologies that are accompanied by exclusive WebTakes". Most of the footnotes for this work were not in the actual book but were online as a WebTake.[23]
How We Think
Her 2012 work How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis, is concerned with how digital media is accepted in academia, particularly the humanities and social sciences. As Jenell Johnson describes, "It is at once an account of the theoretical and technical development of the digital humanities, an argument for its symbiotic relationship to traditional, print-based scholarship, and a demonstration of how its analytical affordances can help us to think differently about texts, as well as the scholars who seek to interpret them".[24] As Joseph Lloyd Donica quotes, "Hayles states that her book 'explores the proposition that we think through, with, and alongside media'".[25] He goes on to note that Hayles discusses "the implications [emphasis mine] of media upheavals within the humanities and qualitative social sciences as traditionally print-based disciplines such as literature, history, philosophy, religion, and art history move into digital media".[25] In this work, Hayles extrapolates "technogenesis" as we move from the age of print to digital. Christoph Raetzsch notes that "How We Think is organized around the term technogenesis, by which Hayles means "the idea that humans and technics have coevolved together"[26] Donica quotes Hayles as claiming that "the ability to access and retrieve information on a global scale has a significant impact on how one thinks about one's place in the world".[25]
As Robert Schaefer explained in his New York Journal of Books review, Hayles postulates that there are two mistaken reactions to digital media in academia: No big deal or outright rejection and calls to "initiate a new branch of academic inquiry: comparative media studies".[27] Hayles advocates for two strategies: assimilating digital scholarship into existing pedagogy and distinguishing digital scholarship that "emphasizes new methodologies" and "research questions."[28]
Unthought
In her 2017 book Unthought: The Power Of The Cognitive Nonconscious, Hayles argues that it is more useful to think about cognition than about intelligence, and that cognition is something that is not unique to humans. Hayles is a posthumanist, so she does not want to divide the world into humans and nonhumans. Instead, she argues, it is more useful to think about cognizers and noncognizers.[29][30] All life forms and some technologies have cognitive capabilities, by Hayles' definition of cognition, whereas a rock or a volcano does not. This allows Hayles to analyse how humans and other life forms interact with technologies and the material world to cause changes, and it provides a theoretical framework for her posthumanist view where the human is no longer seen as the centre of the world. Focusing on cognition rather than on intelligence or consciousness also allows her to analyse how technologies like artificial intelligence can have agency without necessarily being conscious.[30]
Hayles defines cognition as "a process that interprets information within contexts that connect it with meaning",[31] and by this definition, all life forms and some technologies have cognitive capabilities. For example, for a dog, smell is an important type of information. A dog will interpret what it smells within a context - for example, a detection dog working with customs officers at an airport might have been trained to recognise the smell of fruit or meat or certain drugs. The dog interprets the smell within the context of its training, which makes the smell meaningful to it, and it can act upon that meaning.[32] Humans think when formulating abstract ideas or rationally working through a problem, but Hayles is more interested in nonconscious cognition.[33] An example of nonconscious cognition for a human is the rush of adrenaline in response to a frightening situation.[34]:64
Technologies can also be cognizers for Hayles. She calls this technical cognition. Following her general definition of cognition, a computer cognizes when it interprets information within a context that connects it with meaning. That does not mean that it is conscious or that it is intelligent. Another important concept in Unthought is the cognitive assemblage.[35] This is a development of actor–network theory that emphasizes how different cognizers can share information and its processing with each other.[36]
Stephen J. Burn summarizes this work as "...challenging routine notions of what counts as cognition."[37] Burn explains that Hayles "is driven by pressing need to consider the ethical and practical implications of technical cognitive systems—autonomous drones, trading algorithms, surveillance technologies, and so on—that are not "fully alive" but can be "fully cognitive."[37] Burn claims that this work "synthesizes its various sources to map out a layered model of human cognition, presses the case for increasingly urgent ethical questions; and, finally, explores the future for the humanities".[37] Sterns summarizes Hayles's intentions in this work as "She wants us to look more closely at what and how those systems act, cognize, and think, what we do with and as them, and why".[38][3]
Bacteria to AI
This 2025 book examines cognition in the modern world where AI and media and humanity are merging.[3] This work further develops Hayles integrated cognitive framework,[39] exploring meaning-making practices from non-human perspectives, from bacteria to AI, and including plants and animals.[40]
Overall theories
Hayles's work is concerned with the interface of changing technologies and traditional culture, as Christoph Raetzsch explains: "Since the 1970s, N. Katherine Hayles has been exploring the zones of contact between the cultural formations of technology and the technological basis of culture".[41] Sherryl Vint further explains these interstices from Hayles background in both chemistry and literature as Hayles has "always been concerned with combining the two cultures of the sciences and the humanities".[42]
Materiality of information
The structure of the printed book, Writing Machines itself as an artist book, or "technotext" embodies Hayles's contention that how we receive information determines our thinking about the information, as Baetens explains: "material structure which not only helps us to think and write, but which determines our thinking and writing in every possible way".[21] Baetens also notes that "Maybe the most interesting thing about Writing Machines, however, is its 'ars poetica' dimension, that is the fact that the book not only says what it does, but also does what it says".
In terms of the strength of Hayles's arguments regarding the return of materiality to information, several scholars expressed doubt on the validity of the provided grounds, notably evolutionary psychology. Keating claims that while Hayles is following evolutionary psychological arguments in order to argue for the overcoming of the disembodiment of knowledge, she provides "no good reason to support this proposition".[43] Brigham describes Hayles's attempt to connect autopoietic circularity to "an inadequacy in Maturana's attempt to account for evolutionary change" as unjustified.[44] Weiss suggests that she makes the mistake of "adhering too closely to the realist, objectivist discourse of the sciences", the same mistake she criticizes Weiner and Maturana for committing.[45]
Cognition
Hayles is concerned with cognition, as Punday quotes Hayles "She offers this definition: 'Cognition is a process that interprets information within contexts that connect it with meaning.'"[31][46] In How We Think, Hayles "argued for connections between cognition, technology, humanity, and evolution".[47][48] Hayles distinguishes between cognizers (e.g., living thinking beings and some computational media) and non-cognizers or material processes (e.g., mountains eroding). As Punday goes on to quote "Hayles distinguish[es] between what she calls cognizers and noncognizers[49] ... [a]s she explains, "The crucial distinguishing characteristics of cognition that separate it from these underlying processes are choice and decision, and thus possibilities for interpretation and meaning. A glacier, for example, cannot choose whether to slide into a shady valley as opposed to a sunny plain".[50][46]
Embodiment
As scholar Jessica Santone relates about Hayles's 1996 article, "Embodied Virtuality: Or How to Put Bodies Back into the Picture" in the book Immersed in Technology: Art and Virtual Environments, "N. Katherine Hayles succinctly situates the relationship between discourse and practice in the making and erasing of virtual bodies."[51][52] Sherryl Vint explains that Hayles "pushes literary studies toward a greater engagement with the material ways that science and technology shape conceptions of the world and hence our interactions with it and ourselves".[42] In 2021, Hayles explained in an interview that "artificial cognizers are vastly different than humans [...] I think is extremely important are the differences in embodiment. And sometimes, people speak of AI as though these cognizers don't have bodies. But of course, they all have bodies, it's impossible to exist without having a body. It's just that they're embodied in radically different forms than humans are, which lead to many misunderstandings, misrepresentations and misalliances."[53] As Zachary Braiterman, explains, Hayles further developed her ideas of differences in How We Became Posthuman, as he quotes Hayles to summarize these differences "There are just too many differences in the types of embodiment that distinguish aware and self-aware human intelligence from the intelligent machines, no matter how tight the symbiotic relations between them. We remain human-all-too-human."[54]
She was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2015[4][7] and elected to the Academy of Europe.[63] Hayles was inducted into the Innovation Hall of Fame at Rochester Institute of Technology's Simone Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship in 2010.[64] She received honorary doctorates from the Faculty of Arts at Umea University in Sweden (2007),[65] the Art College of Design in Pasadena, CA (2010), and the Royal College of Arts (2024).[66] She was also named a Distinguished Scholar by her alma mater, the University of Rochester.[67][68] Hayles was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 1991.[69]
Hayles has been active in the electronic literature community. Her keynote at the 2002 Electronic Literature State of the Arts Symposium at UCLA introduced the concept of providing a history of electronic literature.[70]
In honor of Hayles's achievements, the Electronic Literature Organization has presented an annual award since 2014 for literary criticism "The N. Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism of Electronic Literature".[71] Recipients include Joseph Tabbi for the Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic Literature (2018), Scott Rettberg for Electronic Literature (2019), and Jessica Pressman for Bookishness (2021).[60]
Selected works
Hayles's work is collected in The NEXT Museum, a digital preservation space.[72]
Books
Hayles, N. Katherine (2025). Bacteria to AI: Human Futures with our Nonhuman Symbionts. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. ISBN9780226835983.
Hayles, N. Katherine (2020). Postprint: Books And Becoming Computational. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN9780231198240.
Hayles, N. Katherine (2017). Unthought: The Power Of The Cognitive Nonconscious. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. ISBN978-0226447889.
Hayles, N. Katherine (2012). How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. ISBN9780226321424.
Hayles, N. Katherine (2008). Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary. South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press. ISBN9780268030858.
Hayles, N. Katherine (2005). My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. ISBN9780226321479.
Hayles, N. Katherine, ed. (2004). Nanoculture: Implications of the New Technoscience.
Hayles, N. Katherine (2002). Writing Machines. Cambridge: The MIT Press. ISBN9780262582155.
Hayles, N. Katherine (1999). How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. ISBN9780226321462.
Technocriticism and Hypernarrative. A special issue of Modern Fiction Studies 43, no. 3, Fall 1997 (guest editor)
Hayles, N. Katherine, ed. (1991). Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. ISBN9780226321448.
Hayles, N. Katherine (1990). Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. ISBN9780801497018.
Hayles, N. Katherine (1984). The Cosmic Web: Scientific Field Models and Literary Strategies in the Twentieth Century. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. ISBN9780801492907.
↑ Rettberg, Jill Walker (2023). Machine vision: how algorithms are changing the way we see the world. Cambridge Hoboken, NJ: Polity. ISBN978-1-5095-4523-0.
↑ Moser, M. A.; MacLeod, D., eds. (1996). "Embodied Virtuality: Or How to Put Bodies Back into the Picture". Immersed in Technology: Art and Virtual Environments. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. pp.1–28.
↑ Grigar, Dene; O'Sullivan, James, eds. (2021). Electronic literature as digital humanities: contexts, forms, & practices. New York London Oxford New Delhi Sydney: Bloomsbury Academic. p.28. ISBN978-1-5013-6348-1.
↑ "ELO Annual Awards". eliterature.org. Electronic Literature Organization. Retrieved March 5, 2025.
Pickering, Andrew (April 1, 2000). "[Review of How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics by N. Katherine Hayles]". Technology and Culture. 41 (2). Johns Hopkins University Press and the Society for the History of Technology: 392–395. doi:10.1353/tech.2000.0079. JSTOR25147527. S2CID109038145.
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