/PhD in English (2023)
My PhD journey is completed and I am delighted to report that the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English was conferred upon me at the University of York on the 20th of January 2023.
My PhD topic is the representation of intelligent machines in fiction of the long nineteenth century. My thesis is published on White Rose eTheses Online from where it can be downloaded. It is titled: Mind over Matter: The Thinking and Speaking Machine in Fiction of the Long Nineteenth Century.
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I have come to realise that existential boundaries interest me, i.e. the question of when a thing stops being itself and morphs into something else entirely. In the nineteenth century people asked these questions about certain machines. For example, could a chess playing automaton (built by Wolfgang von Kempelen in the late eighteenth century) really "think" mechanically and play a game better than a human being? What does this say about the supposed supremacy of the human mind? Would our use of or interaction with machines help us or take away from our humanity? Would it make us super-human or sub-human instead? I looked at how some fictional stories, embedded in their historical contexts, provide insights into how the writers viewed some of these questions and how, throughout the nineteenth century, they used their fictional machines as metaphors in order to comment on contemporary cultural or socio-political events.
This questioning of boundaries and the use of hybrid creatures (half human, half machine or half human, half (mythological) animal) as metaphors of the human experience is also what drives my sculptural practice and I believe that subconsciously my research will continue to influence my Figures of Speech.
The graduation ceremony took place in Central Hall of the University of York's amazing brutalist campus that was built in the 1960s. (I make an appearance 32.30 minutes into the video below.) The photos were taken at Central Hall and at Fred Millett's gorgeous concrete reliefs (1963-1965) that can be found all over the campus.
