Professor Carolyn Pedwell

Professor in Digital Media

Research Overview

Carolyn Pedwell is Professor in Digital Media. She is a cultural and media theorist with an international reputation for her work on affect and artificial intelligence; digital media and culture; habits and social change; the politics of empathy; and feminist, queer, critical race and decolonial studies.

Carolyn is the author of three monographs: Revolutionary Routines: The Habits of Social Transformation (McGill-Queens UP, 2021); Affective Relations: The Transnational Politics of Empathy (Palgrave, 2014); and Feminism, Culture and Embodied Practice: The Rhetorics of Comparison (Routledge, 2010). She is also the co-editor (with Gregory J. Seigworth) of The Affect Theory Reader 2: Worldings, Tensions, Futures (Duke UP, 2023). Carolyn’s monograph in progress is Speculative Machines and Us: Intuition, AI, and the Making of Computational Cultures.

Prior to arriving at Lancaster, Carolyn was Professor of Cultural Studies and Media at the University of Kent; Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at Newcastle University; and ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London. Carolyn has been Visiting Scholar at the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies, University of Sydney; the Centre for the History of Emotions, Queen Mary, University of London; and the Gender Institute, London School of Economics (LSE). Carolyn completed her PhD in Gender Studies at the LSE.

Carolyn’s current research is focused on socio-political, cultural, and affective histories and futures of AI and digital computing. Her British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship (2024-2025), ‘Speculative Machines and Us: Intuition, AI and the Making of Computational Cultures’, is developing an affective post-war genealogy of human-machine relations in Britain and North America oriented around shifting conceptualisations of intuition, with reference to ‘artificial intuition’. Her Leverhulme Fellowship, ‘Digital Media and the Human: The Social Life of Software, AI and Algorithms’ (2020-2021), explored how digital and computational media are transforming ‘the human’. Her research has also been funded by the AHRC, ESRC and SSHRC.

Carolyn was an Editor of the international journal Feminist Theory (Sage) between 2010-2020 and currently sits on the advisory board of the journal. She is also on the advisory board of Imbricate Press and an editorial borad member of Media Theory and Capacious journals.


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