PERSON

N. Katherine Hayles

The literary scholar and theorist who dismantled the disembodiment myth of information science—tracing, from the Macy Conferences to the age of large language models, how cognition spills beyond the skull into technology, and how the liberal humanist subject is not destroyed but redistributed into what she calls the cognitive assemblage.

N. Katherine Hayles is the theorist who restored the body to information. Where the mainstream of computing culture inherited Claude Shannon’s mathematical definition of information as pattern independent of substrate, Hayles spent her career demonstrating that the claim was never true—that information is always inscribed in a material medium, that the medium’s properties shape what can be said, and that forgetting this fact produces systematic misunderstanding of what digital and AI systems actually do. Her landmark 1999 book How We Became Posthuman traced how the fiction of disembodied mind took hold at the very founding moments of information theory, and what the costs of that fiction have been for the way we understand intelligence, agency, and self. The line of inquiry runs unbroken through Writing Machines, Electronic Literature, Unthought, and the 2025 Bacteria to AI, each book tightening the argument that

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