Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan
Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan is a writer, media theorist, and historian of science. His research explores how digital technology--as an ensemble of instruments, practices, inscriptions, and concepts--shapes science, culture, and the environment. He's also published on topics including the emergence of the computer screen from geopolitical anxieties, the changing conditions of digital interactivity from Cold War vigilance and to anthopocentric globalism, recent German media theory, the technological infrastructures of spiritualism, decolonial HCI, critical interface studies, and the ideology of smart cities. In addition to serving as Senior Lecturer in the History and Theory of Digital Media in the Department of Digital Humanities at King's College London, Bernard has curated for the Technosphere Project at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt.
His first book, From Information Theory to French Theory (forthcoming, Duke University Press) examines how information theory and cybernetics shaped the reform of the human sciences in France and the United States after World War II. He shows how conceptions of communication derived from engineering, allied with technocratic agendas, shape the reorientation of research in fields including linguistics, anthropology, psychotherapy, and semiotics. The book offers a revisionist history of "French Theory" as both the humanities' efforts to come to terms with technical ideas of communications and as a neglected predecessor of the contemporary digital humanities.
Bernard's current book project, co-authored with Francesco Casetti, argues for the mutual production of screens and environments, exemplified through four key visual technologies (phantasmagoria, cinema, radar, global positioning systems).
Before joining King's Bernard taught at Yale University, Coventry University, the Humboldt University of Berlin, and the American University of Paris. He also co-programmed and co-curated the Anthopocene Campus of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, named by Artnet as one of the most influential exhibitions of the last decade. He's held fellowships at a number of institutions, including the IKKM (Weimar), the DCRL (Leuphana University), the Institute for Research and Innovation (Pompidou Center), the Whitney Humanities Center (Yale University) and his research has been funded by the Mellon Fondation, the German Research Foundation, the U. S. Department of Education, and the Association for Computing Machinery. He earned a binational Ph.D. from Northwestern University and Bauhaus University Weimar. (2021)
- Publications
- The Cybernetic Apparatus: Media, Liberalism, and the Reform of the Human Sciences, Northwestern University & Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, 2012. PhD dissertation.
- From Information Theory to French Theory, Duke University Press, forthcoming.
- more
- Links
- Home page
- Profile on King's College
- Profile on Yale (archived)
