‘No one has heard of the term’, I remember someone saying in an email. (I can remember trying to persuade Palgrave in about 1998 to call my first edited book Posthumanism. There was plenty of cyberculture and cyborg envy in the air, yes, but this was still several years before Katherine Hayles’s landmark How We Became Posthuman, which really put the signifier on the map. First, when I started work on the project in 1995, very few people in cultural criticism were using the word extensively. I didn’t use the term ‘posthumanism’ in the thesis for two main reasons, I think.

I was, in short, interested in making sense of what I could see in a film like Blade Runner by turning to Lyotard’s nuanced understanding of the ‘post-’ and Derrida’s recognition that binary oppositions are inherently unstable. Instead, I enlisted the work of Jean-François Lyotard to understand the breakdown of the binary opposition as a post modern development as my use of the term ‘binary opposition’ a moment ago probably makes clear, Jacques Derrida was also crucial. Looking back, it would have made sense to present things in terms of posthumanism (a signifier which went on to be important to me until I abandoned it in 2010), but I don’t think that the word appeared anywhere in the thesis. My PhD thesis, which I wrote between 19, was supervised by Catherine Belsey and was on the breakdown of the distinction between the human and the inhuman in twentieth-century fiction and cinema. What was your dissertation about and who was your supervisor?

In December, Neil Badmington (University of Cardiff) visited us. On the occasion of this year’s Histories and Theories of Reading, GEMS welcomes six interesting and inspiring academics: we’ll offer them a coffee, have a chat, and ask the same six questions to each of them.

Moo by jane smiley summary