# N. Katherine Hayles

Nancy Katherine Hayles (born 1943) is an American postmodern 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." She explores how digital technologies affect humanities research. As of March 2025, she is currently a Distinguished Research Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles and the James B. Duke Professor Emerita from Duke University.

## Background and education

Hayles was born in Saint Louis, Missouri to Edward and Thelma Bruns. She received her B.S. in chemistry from Rochester Institute of Technology in 1966, and her M.S. in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology in 1969. She worked as a research chemist in 1966 at Xerox Corporation and as a chemical research consultant Beckman Instrument Company from 1968 to 1970. Hayles then switched fields and received her M.A. in English literature from Michigan State University in 1970, and her Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Rochester in 1977.

## Academic career

Hayles has taught at UCLA, University of Iowa, University of Missouri–Rolla, the California Institute of Technology, and Dartmouth College. She was the faculty director of the Electronic Literature Organization from 2001 to 2006.
From 2008 to 2018, she was a professor of English and Literature at Duke University. In 2018, Hayles retired from Duke as the James B. Duke Distinguished Professor Emerita of Literature, and returned to UCLA, where she now holds an appointment as Distinguished Research Professor of English. Hayles has delivered multiple keynotes, including the HCAS Fellows Symposium for the University of Helsinki in Spring 2019.

## Major works
### How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics 1999

Within the field of Posthuman Studies, Hayles' How We Became Posthuman, 1999. is considered "the key text which brought posthumanism to broad international attention". Nathaniel Stern summarizes this book as re-membering (embodying again) how humans and data “lost their materiality” in our minds and that this loss of materiality is "dead wrong, and that there are major stakes in that misperception." As Linda Brigham notes "How We Became Posthuman tells a twentieth-century tale of "how information lost its body."

#### Writing style, organization, and scope

Reactions to Hayles' writing style, general organization, and scope of the book have been mixed. The book is generally praised for displaying depth and scope in its combining of scientific ideas and literary criticism. Linda Brigham of Kansas State University claims that Hayles manages to lead the text "across diverse, historically contentious terrain by means of a carefully crafted and deliberate organizational structure." Some scholars found her prose difficult to read or over-complicated. Andrew Pickering describes the book as "hard going" and lacking of "straightforward presentation." Dennis Weiss of York College of Pennsylvania accuses Hayles of "unnecessarily complicat[ing] her framework for thinking about the body", for example by using terms such as "body" and "embodiment" ambiguously. Weiss however acknowledges as convincing her use of science fiction in order to reveal how "the narrowly focused, abstract constellation of ideas" of cybernetics circulate through a broader cultural context. Craig Keating of Langara College on the contrary argues that the obscurity of some texts questions their ability to function as the conduit for scientific ideas.

#### Reception of feminist ideas

Several scholars reviewing How We Became Posthuman highlighted the strengths and shortcomings of her book vis a vis its relationship to feminism. Amelia Jones of University of Southern California describes Hayles' work as reacting to the misogynistic discourse of the field of cybernetics. As Pickering wrote, Hayles' promotion of an "embodied posthumanism" challenges cybernetics' "equation of human-ness with disembodied information" for being "another male trick to feminists tired of the devaluation of women's bodily labor." Stephanie Turner of Purdue University also described Hayles' work as an opportunity to challenge prevailing concepts of the human subject which assumed the body was white, male, and European, but suggested Hayles' dialectic method may have taken too many interpretive risks, leaving some questions open about "which interventions promise the best directions to take."

#### Reception of Hayles' construction of the posthuman subject

Reviewers were mixed about Hayles' construction of the posthuman subject. Weiss describes Hayles' work as challenging the simplistic dichotomy of human and post-human subjects in order to "rethink the relationship between human beings and intelligent machines," however suggests that in her attempt to set her vision of the posthuman apart from the "realist, objectivist epistemology characteristic of first-wave cybernetics", she too, falls back on universalist discourse, premised this time on how cognitive science is able to reveal the "true nature of the self." Jones similarly described Hayles' work as reacting to cybernetics' disembodiment of the human subject by swinging too far towards an insistence on a "physical reality" of the body apart from discourse. Jones argued that reality is rather "determined in and through the way we view, articulate, and understand the world".

### Writing Machines 2002

This work in 2002 explores the literary dimensions of new media. This work introduces "first-, second-, and third-generations hypertexts or "technotexts" as Hayles terms them. 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" ([Writing Machines] p. 9)." 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. " 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)” ([Writing Machines] p. 25)" This print book itself is designed as a technotext. As Koskimaa described in the 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.

### How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis 2012

This work (2012) 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." As Joseph Lloyd Donica quotes, "Hayles states that her book “explores the proposition that we think through, with, and alongside media” ([How We Think] 1]). 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” ( [How We Think] 1). "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” ( [How We Think] 10). "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” ( [How We Think] 2).
As Robert Schaefer explained in the 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." Hayles advocates for two strategies: assimilating digital scholarship into existing pedagogy and distinguishing digital scholarship that would "“emphasizes new methodologies” and “research questions” ( [How We Think] 46])."

### Unthought: The Power Of The Cognitive Nonconscious 2017

This work explores human cognition, which goes far beyond human consciousness. Burn summarizes this work as "...challenging routine notions of what counts as cognition." 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” ([Unthought] 22)" Burns claims that this work 'synthesizes its various sources to map out a layered model of human cognition ([Unthought] 27–30), presses the case for increasingly urgent ethical questions; and, ﬁnally, explores the future for the humanities." Sterns summarizes Hayles' 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."

## Overall Theories

Hayles 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." 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." Thus Hayles explores the borderlands of the materiality of information (how we receive information—for example, from print or sound or screen), cognition (how we process the information), and embodiment (how cyberspace and digital artifacts are instantiated and embodied in a platform).

#### Materiality of information

The structure of the printed book, Writing Machines itself as an artist book, or "technotext" embodies Hayles' 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." 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' 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." Brigham describes Hayles' attempt to connect autopoietic circularity to "an inadequacy in Maturana's attempt to account for evolutionary change" as unjustified. 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.

### 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" ([Unthought] 22)." In How We think, Hayles "argued for connections between cognition, technology, humanity, and evolution ([How We Think] 28)." 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 ([Unthought] 30)... [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" ([Unthought] 28).

### Embodiment

As Jessica Santone relates about Hayles' 1996 article, “Embodied Virtuality: Or How to Put Bodies Back into the Picture.” In Immersed in Technology: Art and Virtual Environments. Ed. M. A. Moser and D. MacLeod. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996, 1-28. "N. Katherine Hayles argument succinctly situates the relationship between discourse and practice in the making and erasing of virtual bodies." 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." In 2021, Hayles explained in an interview that "artificial cognisers are vastly different than humans . . .I think is extremely important are the differences in embodiment. And sometimes, people speak of AI as though these cognisers 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." 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 ([How We Became Posthuman 283ff])."

## Awards and honors

Hayles received the René Wellek Prize for How We Became Posthuman, awarded for the best book in the field of comparative literature, from the American Comparative Literature Association in 2000. She was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2015 and elected to the Academy of Europe.
Other awards that Hayles has received include the Electronic Literature Organization's Marjorie Luesebrink Career Achievement Award in 2018, election to the Innovation Hall of Fame at Rochester Institute of Technology's Simone Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship in 2010, the Susanne Langer Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Symbolic Form from the Media Ecology Association for her book Writing Machines in 2003, and the Distinguished Scholar Award from the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts in 1997.
She has honorary doctorates from the Faculty of Arts Umea University in Sweden (2007), the Art College of Design in Pasadena, CA (2010), and the Royal College of Arts (2024). She was also named a Distinguished Scholar by her alma mater, the University of Rochester. She was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1991.

## Electronic literature community

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.
In honor of Hayles' achievements, the Electronic Literature Organization has an annual award since 2014 for literary criticism "The N. Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism of Electronic Literature." Recipients include Joseph Tabbi for the Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic Literature (2018), Scott Rettberg for Electronic Literature (2019), and Jessica Pressman for Bookishness (2021).

## Selected bibliography

Hayle's work is collected in The NEXT Museum, a digital preservation space.

### Books

* Bacteria to AI: Human Futures with our Nonhuman Symbionts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2025. ISBN 9780226835983)
* Postprint: Books And Becoming Computational (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020. ISBN 9780231198240)
* Unthought: The Power Of The Cognitive Nonconscious (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017. ISBN 978-0226447889)
* How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012. ISBN 9780226321424)
* Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary, (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008. ISBN 9780268030858)
* My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005. ISBN 9780226321479)
* Nanoculture: Implications of the New Technoscience (ed.), 2004
* Writing Machines, (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2002. ISBN 9780262582155)
* How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999. ISBN 9780226321462)
* Technocriticism and Hypernarrative. A special issue of Modern Fiction Studies 43, no. 3, Fall 1997 (guest editor)
* Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science. (ed.), (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991. ISBN 9780226321448)
* Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990. ISBN 9780801497018)
* The Cosmic Web: Scientific Field Models and Literary Strategies in the Twentieth Century, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984. ISBN 9780801492907)