Dr Bernard Geoghegan

Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan is a media theorist and historian of science researching how digital technologies shape science, culture, and the environment. He has also worked as a curator. Bernard earned a binational Ph.D. from Northwestern University and Bauhaus University Weimar. He has written on such topics as Orientalism in informatics, anxiety and vigilance shape networked communications, the political origins of interactive digital interfaces, how the rise cybernetics shaped fields such as French theory and family therapy, German media theory, and relations between new media and the occult. His essays appear in journals including Critical Inquiry, Grey Room, Representations, and Theory, Culture & Society. Bernard taught at Yale University, Coventry University, the Humboldt University of Berlin, and the American University of Paris.

Bernard may be reached at www.bernardg.com

Research Interests and PhD Supervision

• History and theory of digital media
• Ethnicity in histories of AI and HCI
• Critical histories of media interactivity
• The psychic and affective aspects of networked communication

For more details, please see his full research profile.

Teaching

History and theory of digital media, STS, critical media practice.

Expertise and Public Engagement

Experience in media curation and educational programming around the Anthropocene and screen cultures.

Selected publications 

• “Orientalism and Informatics: The Alterity in Artificial Intelligence, from the Chess-Playing Turk to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.” Ex-Position 43 (June 2020): 45-90.
• “Textocracy, or, the Cybernetic Logic of French Theory.” History of the Human Sciences 33, no. 1 (2020): 52-79.
• “An Ecology of Operations: Vigilance, Radar, and the Birth of the Computer Screen.” Representations 147, no. 1 (August 2019): 59–95. https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2019.147.1.59.
• “The Smartness Mandate: Notes Towards a Critique” (third author with Orit Halpern and Rob Mitchell). Grey Room 68 (Summer 2017), 106–129.
• “The Family as Machine: Film, Infrastructure, and Cybernetic Kinship in Suburban America.” Grey Room 66 (Winter 2017), 70-101.