Complete Chronological Listing of Texts on This Site
Under the Weather: The Folk Culture of Digital Life. A talk given to the Data Science Seminar, Digital Society Institute, Keele University, 23rd October 2024. [pdf]
The Polity of Mercy. A talk for the New Imago Forum, King’s College, London, 21st September 2024.[pdf]
G.I.G.O. Some words on wording (14th August 2024).
Laura and the Lost Cause of Psychoanalysis. A talk for Laura Marcus: A Symposium, St Cross, Oxford, 29th August 2024.[pdf]
Sacrificial Escalation: The Wishes of Human Vanity. A paper given at The Aesthetics of Failure: Disruption, Loss, Decline, Notre Dame, London, 9th August 2024. [pdf]
Antischismatics. A paper given at Michel Serres and Bruno Latour in Conversation, Maison Française, Oxford, 23rd May 2024. [pdf]
Technology and the Education of Attention. A talk given as part of CTRL+ALT+FUTURE, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, 1st December 2023. [pdf]
Climate Change, Seriously. Stanford University Press Blog, 21st November 2023.
Clean Forgetting. Written for Art and Aesthetics of Forgetting, Meteora Academy, Buti, Italy, 13-16 September 2023. [pdf]
Known by his Tooles: Digital Rage. Written for the Digital Futures Institute at King’s College, London, 26th May 2023. [pdf]
Defection. ‘ChatGPT and the Spectres of Authorship’, In Media Res (25th May 2023).
Living Well With Technology. A talk for the Digital Futures Institute, King’s College London, 23rd May 2023. [pdf] [video]
Thinking Big: Omnipotence and Academic Life. A lecture given at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, 22nd September 2022. [pdf]
Glu-Gloriole: Michel Serres, Glory and the Social Bond. A talk given at the Michel Serres and the Social workshop, Queens’ College, Cambridge, 21st June 2022. [pdf] [video]
Hyperpsychism: or The Myth of Collective Feeling. A lecture given at the Open-Oxford-Cambridge AHRC DTP Cohort Day, Murray Edwards College, Cambridge, 17th May 2022.
The Chit from Matron: Work, and the Making of a Modernist Living. A paper given at the Centre for Modernist Cultures, University of Birmingham, 5th May 2022.
Tones of Face: On Psychophonotypographics. A lecture given at The Acoustic Text: Sound and Music in Literature, a symposium at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, 1st October 2021. [pdf]
Thaumodynamics: Making a Living in Great Expectations. The Hilda Hulme Lecture, Institute of English Studies, London, 9th June 2021. [pdf] [video]
Vision and Sexuality. A lecture given for the ‘Visual Culture’ English Tripos paper, February 2021.
Religion Beyond Belief. 3rd August 2020. [pdf]
Best Wishes: A Psychophilology of Supplications. A paper written for Cambridge Digital Humanities Open Series, 20th May 2020. [pdf] [mp3 intro]
Modernist Anger Management. A paper written for the Centre for Modernist Cultures, University of Birmingham, 18th March 2020. [pdf]
‘Flown in Fumo': Alchemy, Explosion and the Furnace. A paper given at the Aesthetics of Alchemy symposium, Birkbeck, University of London, 24th June 2019. [pdf]
Bodily Wayfare: Nathaniel Fairfax on Matter and Limit. (March 2019). [pdf]
Desperate Remedies. (February 2019) [pdf]
The End of the Word. Some afterthoughts, in advance of its appearance, on my book Giving Way. (February 2019) [pdf]
Proofs of the Pudding. Some thoughts on proof-correction, 17th September 2018. [pdf]
Nothing Doing: The Remissions of Transmission. A talk given at the IKKM Lab, Weimar, 15th June 2018. [pdf]
Cohibitions: On Cultural Refraining. A lecture given at the Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies, University of Heidelberg, 28th May 2018. [pdf]
Exopistemology: On Knowing Without a Knower. A lecture given on 23rd May 2018 at the Internationales Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie (IKKM), Weimar. [pdf] [video]
Stupid Shame. A talk given at the Vulnerability Seminar, University College London Institute of Advanced Studies, 17th January 2018. [pdf] [listen]
Modern Epistemopathies. A paper given at the 20th-Century Research Seminar, University of East Anglia, 11th October 2017. [pdf]
@: Places of Learning. A talk given at the Excavating Media conference, University of Cambridge, 1st July 2017. [pdf]
Screen Tests: The Catastrophe of the Screen. A lecture given at the 27th International Screen Studies Conference, University of Glasgow, 25th June 2017. [pdf]
The Word on the Street: Public Reading and Reading in Public. A lecture given at Reading and its Objects, University of Sussex, 8th May 2017. [pdf]
Ludicrous Inbodiment. A lecture given at Embodiment and Emancipation, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, 7th April 2017. [pdf]
Emergency, Imagination, Management. A lecture written for TORCH, The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities, 23rd February 2017. [pdf]
Dying to Know. [pdf] 14th January 2017.
Auricles, Oracles, Otacoustica: On Overhearing. A talk given at Earpieces: Listening, Diagnosing, Writing, Cambridge, 17th December 2016. [pdf]
Undead Letters: Beckett’s Anus Accidentels. A talk given at the Samuel Beckett Symposium, marking the publication of The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Vol. IV. 1966-1989, ed. George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn and Lois More Overbeck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), King’s College, Cambridge, 25th November 2016. [pdf]
Dickens and the Date. A talk given at Dickens’s Days: Heritage, Celebrations and Anniversaries, Institute of English Studies, London, 8th October 2016. [pdf]
Psychotechnographies: Why All Machines Are Imaginary Machines. A paper given at the Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt, 2nd June 2016 [pdf]
The Crisis Work. An opening statement given at the Art/Money/Crisis conference, University of Cambridge, 29th April 2016. [pdf]
Dream Machines. A lecture given at the Object Emotions: Polemics conference, Gonville and Caius College and Peterhouse, Cambridge, 15th April 2016.[pdf]
Acousmania. A lecture given at Sound Studies: Art, Experience, Politics, CRASSH, Cambridge, 10th July 2015. [pdf]
Parables of the Para-. A lecture given at Parasites, Cambridge French Graduate Conference, Emmanuel College, Cambridge, 14th May 2015. [pdf]
Quantality: The Mathematical Futures of the Humanities. A talk given at the University of Exeter, 8th May 2015. [pdf]
Choralities. A lecture given at Voices and Noises, Audiovisualities Lab of the Franklin Humanities Institute, Duke University, 27th March 2015. [pdf]
Sporting World, Worlding Sport. A paper presented at Humanities Futures, John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, Duke University, 25th March 2015. [pdf]
By Numbers. A talk given as part of The Human Zoo, BBC Radio 4, 27th January 2015 [pdf] [listen]
How To Do Things With Writing Machines A lecture given at Modern Technographies, Centre for Modernism Studies in Australia, University of New South Wales, 12th December 2014. [pdf]
To The Ear A Great Compassion: Listening, Counting and Number A paper given at the Faculty of Music Research Colloquium, University of Oxford, 11th November 2014. [pdf]
The Horror of Number: Can Humans Learn to Count? The Alexander Lecture, given at at University College, University of Toronto, 1st October, 2014. [pdf]
Guys and Dolls. An essay prompted by Silent Partners: Artist and Mannequin from Function to Fetish, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, Tuesday 14 October 2014-Sunday 25 January 2015, Musée Bourdelle, Paris, 31 March–12 July 2015. [pdf] [podcast] Published in Women: A Cultural Review, 26 (2015): 129-41.
Modes of Manifold Writing. A text on the polygraph, written for the Literature-Technology-Media website, University of Cambridge, 13th September 2014. [pdf]
Body-Doubles. A talk given as part of The Human Zoo, BBC Radio 4, 8th July 2014 [pdf version] [listen]
Sadistic Listening. A paper written for the John E. Sawyer Seminar, Hearing Modernity, Harvard University, 14th April 2014. [pdf] [video]
Hilarious Arithmetic. The Annual Churchill Lecture, given at the University of Bristol, 27th February, 2014. [pdf version]
‘What’s one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one?’ Literature, Number and Death. A talk given at the 20th-21st Literature Seminar, University of Oxford, 4th December, 2013. [pdf version]
Channels. A lecture given at the Literature Media Sound conference, University of Aarhus, 30th November 2013.[pdf version]
Collective Emotions: Reasons to Feel Doubtful. The History of Emotions annual lecture given at Queen Mary, University of London, 9th October 2013. [pdf version]
A Time for Such a Word. A talk given at In Imagination: The Future Reflected in Art and Argument, a symposium in Sheffield in conjunction with the UK premiere of Forced Entertainment’s Tomorrow’s Parties, 4th October 2013.[pdf version]
Rustications: Animals in the Urban Mix. A lecture given at the Australasian Association of Literature conferenceModern Soundscapes, the University of New South Wales, 10th July 2013. [pdf version]
Quantum Writing: Literature and the World of Numbers. A lecture given at the Institute of Continuing Education, Cambridge, 13th June 2013. [pdf version}
Soap, Senstance and Semblance. Some thoughts developed for the Institute of Making, University College, London, 19th April 2013, and further elaborated in a talk at the Blake Society, Downing College, Cambridge, 1st May 2013.[pdf version]
Polyphiloprogenitive: Towards a General Performativity. A paper precirculated for the panel ‘What Is Performance?’ at Beyond the Authority of the ‘Text': Performance as Paradigm, Past and Present, CRASSH, Cambridge, 16th April 2013. [pdf version]
About There,or Thereabouts. A talk given at the Catalysis conference on Space and Time, Downing College, Cambridge, 23rd March 2013.[pdf version]
Concentrate. A talk given as part of The Human Zoo, BBC Radio 4, 5th March 2013[pdf version] [listen]
Dying Well. A talk given at Dying Well, an evening of readings performed by Paola Dionisotti and George Irving at the Wellcome Collection, 1st February 2013, to introduce the symposium What Makes A Good Death? [pdf version]
Two-step, Nerve-tap, Tanglefoot: Tapdance Typologies in Cinema. A talk given at the Screen Media Research Seminar, CRASSH, Cambridge, 6th November 2012. [pdf version]
Taking Pity on Things. A talk given as part of the Festival of Ideas, Cambridge, 26th October 2012. [pdf version]
Homo Addictus. A text prepared for the workshop Investigating the Intoxication of the Senses: Pleasure, Poison and Perception, 1600-Present, CRASSH, University of Cambridge, 24 October 2012. [pdf version]
Accidence. In (.) Imogen Stidworthy (London: Matt’s Gallery/Maastricht: Jan van Eyck Academie, 2012), pp. 63-79. [pdf version]
Blissed Out – On Hedonophobia. A talk given at the Pleasure symposium, De Montfort University, 25th June 2012. [pdf version]
Feeling Things. A talk given at Objects of Emotion, Wellcome Collection, London, 16th June 2012. [pdf version]
-sistence. A text written to accompany Into the Eyes as Ends of Hair, an exhibition of work by Nina Canell, Cubitt Gallery, London, 22 March-4 May 2012. [pdf version]
Panophonia. A talk given at the Pompidou Centre, Paris, 22nd February 2012. [pdf version]
Florilegium. A text about plants and language which appears in Heide Hatry: Not A Rose, ed. Heide Hatry (Milan and New York: Charta, 2012), pp. 50-3. [pdf]
A Philosophy of Everyday Things. A conversation with Brian Dillon recorded for the Pod Academy, 5th December 2011.
Shackling Accidents: Culture and Chance. A talk given at the University of Kent, 20 November 2011. [pdf version]
The Poorest Things Superfluous: On Redundancy. A talk given at the Rubbish Symposium, Birkbeck College, London, 30 July 2011. [pdf version]
Smear Campaigns. A talk given at the Unclean Beings symposium, Wellcome Colection, 16 July 2011. [pdf version]
Photophonics. A lecture given at the Audiovisuality conference, University of Aarhus, 27 May 2011. It is published in Sound Effects, 3.1 (2013): 132-48. [pdf version]
Intact. A talk given at the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, as part of Embodied Values: Bringing the Senses Back to the Environment, the John E. Sawyer Seminar Series at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH), University of Edinburgh, 20 May 2011 [pdf version]
A Certain Convocation of Politic Worms. A talk given at A talk given at A Dying Artist, ICA, London, 23 April 2011 [pdf version]
Public Intellectuals and Public Intelligence. A talk given at a seminar on Public Intellectuals, University of Utrecht, 11 April 2011. [pdf version]
Titivillitium:The Tittle-Tattle of the Teeth. A talk given at A talk given at Performed Voices: Whispering, Shadowing, Prompting, Jerusalem, 30 January 2011.[pdf version]
Art, Radio and Alibi. A talk given at Performing Art History, Courtauld Institute, London, 27 January 2011.[pdf version]
Climacteric. A text evoking a walk around Susan Phillipsz’s Surround Me, City of London, November 2010.[pdf version]
Imaginary Touch. A talk given at the Touched conference, Liverpool Biennial, 18 September 2010.[pdf version]
Chiasmus: A Rough History of the Guttural. A talk given at the Song, Stage and Screen conference, University of Winchester, 5 September 2010. [pdf version]
The Chances of Literature. A talk given at the Literature and Mathematics conference, University of Aberdeen, 12 June 2010 [pdf version]
Plugs. A chapter from my book Paraphernalia, published in Forum: University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture and the Arts, 10 (2010) . [pdf version]
The Dust That Measures All Our Time. An essay on sand, written May 2010. [pdf version]
Thinking Out Loud. A talk given in the London Consortium seminar series Thinking Radio, 10 March 2010. [pdf version]
Secession. A lecture given at Sonic Acts XIII: The Poetics of Space, Amsterdam, 27 February 2010 [pdf version] [listen]
Auscultations (Listening In). A lecture given, in different versions, at the University of Iowa Sound Research Seminar 29 January 2010 and at Sonic Acts XIII: The Poetics of Space, Amsterdam, 27 February 2010 [pdf version]
A Philosophy of Fidgets. A talk given as part of the Liverpool Biennial Touched Talks, 17 February 2010 [pdf] [video]
Inclining to the View. A talk on diagonality given at the Seeing From Above symposium, Wellcome Trust, 6 February 2009. [pdf version]
Looping the Loop: Tape-Time in Burroughs and Beckett. A lecture given in the series Taping the World, University of Iowa, 28 January 2010. [pdf version]
Michel Serres: The Hard and the Soft. A talk given at the Centre for Modern Studies, University of York, 26 November 2009. [pdf version]
Thinking Things. A plenary lecture given at ESSE-9, the 9th annual conference of the European Society for the Study of English (ESSE), Aarhus, Denmark, 25 August 2008 and as the Textual Practice lecture, University of Sussex, 14 October 2009. [pdf version]
All I Believed Is True: Dickens and the Mesmerism System. A talk given at Dickens and Science, Dickens Day, Birkbeck College, London, 10 October 2009. [pdf version]
Making Flies Mean Something. A lecture given at the Beckett and Animality conference, University of Reading, 26 September 2009. [pdf version]
Beghosted Bodyhood: Hypochondria and the Arts of Illness. An essay based on talks given at the North-East Network for Medicine and the Arts, St. Chad’s College, Durham, 16 June 2008 and Tate Britain, 18 September 2009. [pdf version]
The Times of Our Lives. A talk given at the symposium How Insect Are We?, part of Pestival, an Insect Arts Festival, Zoological Society of London, 3 September 2009. [pdf version]
Doing Without Art. A talk given to the Writing and Society Research Group, University of Western Sydney, 8 July 2009. [pdf version]
Literature, Politics and the Loutishness of Learning. A paper developed from a talk given at the Samuel Beckett: Debts and Legacies seminar, Regent’s Park College, Oxford, 19 June 2009, and a plenary lecture to the Literature and Politics conference of the Australasian Association of Literature, University of Sydney, 6 July 2009. [pdf version]
Animals and the Sporting Life. A talk given as a Birkbeck Lunchtime Lecture, 3 June 2009.
Witchknots, Knitwits and Knots Intrinsicate. A text written to accompany Ravelling, Unravelling, an exhibition of work by Naheed Raza exploring the theme of entanglement in medicine, art, literature and philosophy, Royal Institution, London,13-28 May 2009. [pdf version]
Writing, Thinking, Playing, Laughing. A paper developed from talks given at the Kingston Philosophy Café, 7 May 2009, and in the series Witty Art: Jokes and Their Relation to the Arts, Institute for Theatre Studies, Freie Universität, Berlin, 14 May 2009. [pdf version]
The Chronopher. A talk given at the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC), Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, 2 April 2009. [pdf]; reprinted in The Oxford Handbook of Voice Studies, ed. Kathy Meizel and Nina Sun Eidsheim (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
Such Stuff As Dreams Are Made On. An expanded version of an essay on taxidermy in art published as ‘The Right Stuff’ in Modern Painters (March 2009): 58-63. [pdf version]
Writing The White Voice. A talk given at the Sound, Silence and the Arts symposium, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, 28 February 2009. [pdf version]
Obnubilation. An extended version of a talk given in a series devoted to Clouds, broadcast as BBC Radio 3’s The Essay, 25 February 2009. [pdf version] [
listen] [download mp3]
Earslips: Of Mishearing and Mondegreens. A talk given at the conference Listening In, Feeding Back, Columbia University 14 February 2009. [pdf version] [ listen] [download mp3]
Sporting Modernism. An expanded version of a talk given at the Centre for Modernist Studies, University of Sussex, 14 January 2009. [pdf version]
Ear Room. A talk given at the Audio Forensics Symposium, Image-Music-Text Gallery, London, 30 November, 2008. [pdf version]
Wherever: The Ecstasies of Michel Serres. A lecture given at Digital Art and Culture in the Age of Pervasive Computing, Copenhagen, 14 November 2008. [pdf version]
Man Is A Rope. A text written to accompany Catherine Yass’s High Wire, a film installation first shown at The Centre for Contemporary Arts for the Glasgow international Festival of Contemporary Visual Art, 11 April – 24 May 2008. It appears in Catherine Yass, High Wire (London: Artangel and Glasgow International Festival of Contemporary Visual Art, 2008), no pagination [pdf version]
Unholy Smoke. A talk given at Trailing Smoke, Art Workers Guild, London, 12 November 2008, an evening of talks accompanying the exhibition Smoke, Pump House Gallery, Battersea, curated by Implicasphere. [pdf version]
Pulverulence. A talk given at An Evening of Dust, organised by Cabinet Magazine for the Hayward Gallery, London, 17 October 2008. [pdf version]
On the Offensive. A contribution to the BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking 08 series, broadcast 14 October 2008. [listen] [download mp3]
Sound Stories. A discussion of ventriloquism for RTÉ Radio 1’s Sound Stories, broadcast 9 September 2008. [listen]
Taking to the Air. A talk broadcast on Resonance FM, as part of the Free University of the Airwaves, 18-22 August 2008. [ listen]
Elan Mortel: Life, Death and Laughter. A talk given at Forms of Life, European Summer School in Cultural Studies, 31 July 2008. [pdf version]
Resonance. A talk broadcast on Resonance FM, 14 July 2008. [pdf version] [ listen] [download mp3]
Scilicet: Kittler, Media and Madness. A talk given at Media Matters: Friedrich Kittler and Technoculture, 26 June 2008. [pdf version] [ listen] [download mp3]
De Singultu: The Life and Times of the Sob. A talk given at the Breaking Voices symposium, London College of Fashion, 7 June 2008. [pdf version]
He That Hath Not That Earth That He Is. An expanded version of a talk given at Travelling Concepts: The Body, a research seminar held at the Centre for Research in Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), University of Cambridge, 30 May 2008. [pdf version]
Gasworks. An essay for the online journal 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 6 (2008).
Pregnable of Eye: X-Rays, Vision and Magic. An expanded version of a text written to accompany Phillip Warnell’s film, The Girl With X-Ray Eyes (2008). A version of this text was also given as a talk given for the annual conference of the British Society for Literature and Science, Keele University, 29 March, 2008. [pdf version]
Whisper Music. A lecture given at theTake a Deep Breath symposium, Tate Modern, 15 February 2007. and atGiving Voice, Centre for Performance Research, Aberystwyth, 28 March 2008. [pdf version]
Writing the Lives of Words. A talk given for the University of London Research Skills Intercollegiate Network(ReSkIN), Courtauld Institute of Art, 1st March 2008. [pdf version]
Play Grounds: The Arenas of Game. A lecture given in the Bartlett School of Architecture International Lecture Series, 13 February 2008. [pdf version]
Inside and Outside Voices. An interview about ventriloquism with Enzo Mansueto for Rodeo magazine (Milan). An edited version of the interview appears as ‘Le Voci Dentro e Fuori di Noi’, Rodeo, 43 (2008): 66.
Drood and the Dust of Delight. A talk given at the Edwin Drood Day, Birkbeck College, 13 October 2007. [pdf version]
Beckett’s Low Church. A lecture given at the English Institute symposium Beyond Belief, Harvard University, 28 September 2007.
La Voce Come Medium. An interview with Massimo Gezzi, conducted for the publication of La voce come medium: la storia culturale del ventriloquio, trans. Massimo Gezzi (Rome: Luca Sossella, 2007), Italian translation ofDumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism.
I Believe That The World. A keynote lecture given at ‘Ways of Worldmaking’, European Summer School in Cultural Studies, Heidelberg, 2 August 2007.
Next to Nothing: The Arts of Air. A talk given at Art Basel, 13 June 2007. [pdf version] A version of this talk appeared in Tate Etc, 12 (2008): 82-93.
Thinking Perhaps Begins There: The Question of the Animal. A review-essay published in Textual Practice 21 (2007): 577-84. [pdf version]
Inebriate of Air: Gas, Magic and Omnipotence of Thought in the Nineteenth Century. An extended version of a paper given at the Magical Thinking conference, Birkbeck College, 11 May 2007.
Flysight. An enlarged version of an essay that appears in Cabinet, 25 (2007): 78-84.
Fix. A text written in April 2007. [pdf]
Sound and the Pathos of the Air. A talk given 21st April 2007 at Two Thousand + SEVEN, a symposium held at theSonic Arts Research Center, Queen’s University Belfast, in parallel to the Sonorities Festival of Contemporary Music.
A Short Stirring to Meekness. A lecture given on 29 March 2007 at the international workshop Inside Knowledge: (Un)doing Methodologies, Imagining Alternatives, Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis.
Big Bangs and Whimpers: The Ends and Beginnings of Science. A lecture given in the lunchtime lecture seriesScience And Its Fictions, Birkbeck College, 13 December 2006. [pdf version]
Carter’s Parrot (And Other People’s Animals). This essay appears in ‘Shared Space, Brokered Time’, a special edition of Southerly devoted to the work of Paul Carter, 66 (2006): 7-20. [pdf version]
Strings in the Earth and Air. A lecture given at the Music and Postmodern Cultural Theory Conference, University of Melbourne, December 6th 2006.
It. My contribution to Exquisite Corpse, a ‘collectively authored chain of thought’, devised by Aura Satz, and on show at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK, as part of the Hans Bellmer-Pierre Klossowski exhibition, 20 September-19th November 2006. [pdf version]
Her Light Materials. This review of Marina Warner’s Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media Into the Twenty-First Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) appeared in The Independent, 27 October, 2006, under the title ‘The Progress of the Soul’. [pdf version]
Beckett and the World. A lecture given at the Global Beckett conference, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, 26 October 2006. [pdf version]
Sufficently Decayed. A talk given at the Frieze Art Fair, Regent’s Park, London, 15 October 2006.
‘On Such and Such a Day…In Such a World': Beckett’s Radical Finitude. A lecture given at Borderless Beckett, An International Centenary Symposium, Tokyo, 1st October 2006. [pdf version]
Atmospherics: The Weather of Sound. A lecture given at Sounding Out 3, University of Sunderland, 8 September 2006.
At Your Fingertips. An expanded version of a review of The Book of Touch, ed. Constance Classen (New York and London: Berg, 2005), that appeared in the Times Higher Education Supplement, 1757 (25 August 2006), p. 28.[pdf version]
Architecture on Air. An interview with Mark Morris, recorded on 27 June 2006, and distributed as part of the podcast interview series Architecture on Air, organised by the School of Architecture of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
Exhaust. A talk given at the Modernity and Waste conference, University of St. Andrews, 16th June 2006.
Haze: On Nebular Modernism. A paper given at Modernism and Beyond: Interdisciplinary Seminar in Art Theory and Literary Theory, Trinity College, Oxford, 12 May, 2006. [pdf version]
The Antient Commonwealth of Flies. Some arguments and instances arising from, but not forming part of, my bookFly. [pdf version]
Phonophobia: The Dumb Devil of Stammering. A talk given, as ‘Giving Out Voice’, at the Giving Voice conference, Centre for Performance Research, University of Aberystwyth, 8 April, 2006.
Against Life. A paper given at the conference Forensic Futures: Interrogating the Posthuman Subject, Birkbeck, 18 March 2006.[pdf version]
How to Get Out of Your Head: Toward a Philosophy of Mixed Bodies. A talk given to the London Consortium, 26 January 2006.
Defiling Celebrity. A paper given in the Cultural History of Celebrity seminar at the Humanities Research Centre of the University of Warwick, 24 October 2005.
Forgeries: The Metallurgy of Great Expectations. A talk given at the Birkbeck Great Expectations Day, 24 September 2005.
The Menagerie of the Senses. A lecture given at the sixth Synapsis conference, I cinque sensi (per tacer del sesto), Bertinoro, Italy, 1 September 2005. [pdf version]
Gruelling. An expanded version of a review article of Roman Polanski’s Oliver Twist (2005), which appeared in theMail on Sunday on 21st August 2005.
Playstations. Or, Playing in Earnest. A lecture given at Playtime! The Cultures of Play, Gaming and Sports, the European Summer School, Institute of Contemporary Arts, 26 July, 2005.
‘My Fortieth Year Had Come and Gone and I Still Throwing the Javelin': Beckett’s Athletics. A talk given at theBeckett International Foundation Research Seminar, 18 June 2005
Thermotaxis.html. An essay on the thermodynamics of culture written in April 2005.
Damage. A talk given at the Barbican Art Gallery to accompany an exhibition of work by Christian Marclay, 6 April 2005.
A Dim Capacity For Wings: Angels, Flies and the Material Imagination. A paper given at a research seminar in the Department of English, University of Stirling, 10 November 2004.
Circumlocation: Waves, Wheels, Worlds. An expanded version of a text written to accompany In the Shadows of Heaven, an exhibition of works by Max Mosscrop, produced as artist-in-residence at the Theatre Royal Margate, October 2004.
The Perplexity of A Tale of Two Cities (Tastes, Rather Than Glimpses). A talk given at the Tale of Two Cities Day held at Birkbeck, 25 September 2004.
‘Transported Shiver of Bodies': Weighing the Victorian Ether. A lecture given at Victorian Sensation, the conference of the British Association of Victorian Studies, University of Keele, 3 September 2004.
The Strains of the Voice. English text of an essay written to accompany the exhibition Phonorama: Eine Kulturgeschichte der Stimme als Medium, curated by Brigitte Felderer, at the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe, 18 September 2004 – 30 January 2005.
Overlooking. A paper given at Witness: Memory, Representation and the Media in Question, European Summer School in Cultural Studies, Copenhagen, August 26, 2004.
Corridors. A ‘love letter to an unloved place’, broadcast in BBC3 Nightwaves, 22 June 2004.
On the Air. The script of a feature broadcast at 21.30 on BBC Radio 3 on 13 June 2004. Listen
Cutaneous. An interview with Brian Dillon regarding The Book of Skin. An edited version of the interview appears inCabinet: A Quarterly of Art and Culture, 13 (2004): 44-8.
Volts From The Blue. A talk given at the day conference Electra: Electricity in Culture at the Royal Institution, 22 May 2004.
The Throat of the Loon. A transcript of a conversation with Julius Nil as a guest on his Resonance FM programme,One Reason to Live, 4 May 2004. A less groomed version of the transcript appears in One Reason to Live: Conversations About Music With Julius Nil, ed. Seth Kim-Cohen (Los Angeles: Errant Bodies Press, 2006). [pdf version]
Windbags and Skinsongs. A chapter written for The Book of Skin, and given, in compressed form, as a lecture at the conference Skin: texture/textuality/word/image at the Institute of English Studies, 14 April 2004.
Building Breathing Space. A lecture given at the Bartlett School of Architecture, 2 March 2004.
Incidents of the Breath: In Pneumatic and Electric Ventriloquisms. A lecture given in the series ‘Artificial Others: Lectures on Ventriloquism and Automata’ at the Ruskin School of Art and Drawing, Oxford, 17 February 2004.
Intersensoriality. A lecture given at the conference The Senses at Thames Valley University, 6 February 2004.
The Vapours. A paper given at Queen Mary, University of London, 10 December 2003.
A Certain Slant of Light. A sound-essay on twilight, broadcast in BBC Radio 3’s Nightwaves, 31 October 2003. Listen
Steam Radio: On Theatre’s Thin Air. A paper given at the London Theatre Seminar, 27 October 2003.
Modernism in Midair. A lecture given at the fifth Modernist Studies Association conference, Birmingham UK, 25 September 2003.
An Air That Kills: A Familiar History of Poison Gas. A paper given at the Death By Technology conference, Birkbeck College, 30 May 2003.
Not All of One Mind: Psychoanalysis and Culturanalysis. A paper given as part of the British Psychoanalytical Society Conference ‘The Freudian Century’? The Impact of Psycho-Analysis on Intellectual Life in Britain, London, 16-17 May, 2003.
Chronic Fatigue. Some thoughts prepared for the ‘Bare Life’ panel, in response to a keynote talk given by Alphonso Lingis, in the Research Symposium Civic Centre: Reclaiming the Right to Performance , London, 9-16 April 2003.
Ears Have Walls: On Hearing Art. A talk given at Tate Modern in the series Challenging Ocularcentricity, 21 February 2003.
Maculate Conceptions. An essay on spots, also published in Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture, 1 (2003): 49-63.
Beckett’s Atmospheres. A paper given at the ‘After Beckett/Après Beckett’ conference, Sydney, January 2003.
What Can Cultural Studies Do? The text of an interview conducted for Interrogating Cultural Studies: Interviews in Cultural Theory, Practice and Politics, ed. Paul Bowman (London: Pluto, 2003).
S m o g. A talk broadcast in BBC’s Nightwaves, 2 December 2002, fifty years after the London’s Great Smog of 1952. Listen
Sleights of Voice: Ventriloquism, Magic and the Harry Price Collection. A talk given to the Friends of the University of London Library, 28 November 2002.
The Help of Your Good Hands: Reports on Clapping. Some thoughts on the singular cultural phenomenon of clapping, added 30 October 2002.
Men In Skirts. This essay also appears in Women: A Cultural Review, 13 (2002): 257-71.
Seeing Sound: The Displaying of Marsyas. A lecture given at the University of Nottingham, 16 October 2002.
Oxygen Debt: Little Dorrit‘s Pneumatics. A lecture given at the Birkbeck Little Dorrit Day, 28 September 2002.
Dickens, The Haunting Man: (On L-iterature). An extended version of a paper given at the conference A Man For All Media: The Popularity of Dickens 1902-2002 , Institute for English Studies, July 25-27 2002.
Michel Serres’s Milieux. An extended version of a paper given at the ABRALIC (Brazilian Association for Comparative Literature) conference on ‘Mediations’, Belo Horizonte, July 23-26 2002.
Isobel Armstrong’s Material Imagination. A paper given at the conference ‘Radical Aesthetics: The Work of Isobel Armstrong’, organised by the Institute for English Studies by Anne Janowitz, Sally Ledger, Jo McDonagh and Laura Marcus on 21st June 2002.
Topologies: Michel Serres and the Shapes of Thought. A paper written for a conference on ‘Literature and Science’ conference in Ascoli Piceno, 20-22 May 2002. It is forthcoming in Anglistik in Autumn 2003.
Watching the Birdie. A response to the production of To You, The Birdie (Phèdre) by The Wooster Group at the Riverside Studios in May 2002, for a symposium on the work of the Wooster Group at the Cochrane Theatre London, 14-15 May 2002, organised by Andrew Quick and Adrian Heathfield.
Hey Good Looking: or, Toward a Final Victory of the Beauty-System. A short text written, I suppose, around 2002.
A Skin That Walks. A lecture given at the Humanities and Arts Research Centre, Royal Holloway University of London, February 13, 2002.
The Law of Marks. A paper given at the Birkbeck School of Law Research Seminar 21st November 2001.
Edison’s Teeth: Touching Hearing. A paper written for the conference ‘Hearing Culture’, Oaxaca, Mexico, April 24-28 2002, organised by the Wenner-Gren Foundation.
Live Unknown. A short text in praise of obscurity, written around 2001.
Flat Life. A paper given at the University of Glasgow in March 2001.
Life Writing. An extended review of Ian Campbell Ross, Laurence Sterne: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), broadcast as Radio 3’s Book of the Month, Wednesday 21 March 2001. Listen
An Airmail From the Monster. A text broadcast on BBC Radio 3’s Nightwaves, 31 January 2001, to mark the 150th anniversary of Mary Shelley’s death. Listen
Not a Case of Writing. An expanded version of a contribution to The Spirit of Writing: Classic and Contemporary Essays Celebrating the Writing Life, ed. Mark Waldman (New York: Tarcher/Putnam, 2001), pp. 298-300. [pdf]
The Shame of Being a Man. A paper given as part of the Gender and Sexuality seminar series, University of London, 30 November 2000.
As Entomate as Intimate Could Pinchably Be. A paper first given, under the title ‘Modernism’s Insect Life’, at theModernist Transactions conference at the University of Birmingham June 30th 2000.
Seeing Feelingly. Introduction to the catalogue of the exhibition Peter Randall- Page: New Sculpture, Drawings and Prints, organised by the Djanogly Art Gallery , Nottingham, 13 January – 25 February 2001.
Isaac Rosenberg: Birkbeck’s War Poet. A lecture given as part of Birkbeck College’s Mechanics to Millennium series, 30 October, 2000.
Consequential Ground: The Foot Passengers of Bleak House. A lecture given at the Bleak House Day held at Birkbeck College, 30 September 2000.
Weird Science. The expanded text of a paper given at the Remembering the 90s conference, Birkbeck College, 8 September, 2000.
Repression, or, The Back-Pedal Brake. The text of a talk broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on July 1, 2000.
Destitution. A lecture given at the Metaphors of Economy conference, University of East Anglia, 23 June 2000.
‘A Door Half Open To Surprise’: Charles Madge’s Imminence. A paper given at the Charles Madge and Mass Observation conference held at the University of Sussex, May 12th, 2000.
The Shakes. A piece of writing that resulted from an invitation to speak at the Research Seminar of the Roehampton Institute Department of Drama, 30 March 2000.
Soul Subtlety. A review talk centring on Daniel Pick’s Svengali’s Web, broadcast as BBC Radio 3’s Book of the Month , 9 March 2000. Listen
Sounding Out Film. A much expanded version of a paper given at the conference on Literature, Film and Modernity, 1880-1940, organised jointly by the Institute for English Studies, the University of Sussex and the University of Birmingham in London, January 13-15th 2000.
Shifting Ground. English version of ‘Auf schwankendem Boden’, written for the exhibition catalogue,Samuel Beckett, Bruce Nauman (Vienna: Kunsthalle Wien, 2000), pp. 80-7.
Rough Magic. A series of radio essays exploring the mysteries of everyday objects (bags, wires, screens, sweets), broadcast by BBC Radio 4, January-February 2000. Listen to Bags; Wires, Screens, Sweets.
Remarks on Contemporary Music and Listening. Interview extracts broadcast as part of BBC Radio 3’sSettling the Score series and reprinted in Settling the Score: A Journey Through Twentieth-Century Music, ed. Michael Oliver (London: Faber and Faber, 1999).
Violence, Victims and Gender. An occasional piece aimed at The Guardian – and, as it turned out, missing by a mile.
Beside Himself: Glenn Gould and the Prospects of Performance. A talk broadcast by BBC Radio 3 on 4 November 1999 as part of an evening exploring the life and work of Glenn Gould. Listen
Michel Serres’s Five Senses. A paper given at the Michel Serres conference on May 29th 1999.
Modernism and the Writing Hand. An amplified version of a paper given at the Modernism and the Technology of Writing conference organised by Tim Armstrong in the Institute of English Studies, March 26, 1999.
What If There Were No Such Thing As The Aesthetic? A contribution, not an altogether helpful one, perhaps, to a seminar programme called The Function of Contemporary Aesthetics, organised by John Armstrong for the Centre for English Studies and the University of London Philosophy Programme. My paper was given on March 3rd, 1999.
Slow Going. A paper given at the Critical Beckett conference held in Birmingham on 26 September 1998. It has been published in print form in Yearbook of English Studies, 30 (2000): 153-65.
Towards a New Demonology. A paper given at the Becoming Human conference mounted at Birkbeck College by the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Culture and the Humanities on September 25, 1998.
How He Was: Samuel Beckett’s Lives. Review of two biographies of Beckett.
Art, Criticism and Laughter. The text of a paper given at a conference devoted to the work of Terry Eagleton held in Oxford and organised by the Raymond Williams Trust in March 1998.
History in Bits. An expanded version of a paper that was given at the conference After the New Historicism, organised by Steve Clark for the Centre for English Studies, and held at the Clore Centre, Birkbeck College, 13-14 March 1998.
A Few Don’ts By A Cultural Phenomenologist. A rough-and-unready manifesto for the kind of work I thought I wanted to do and see more of.
Romanticism, Modernity and Biography. The text of a talk broadcast as BBC Radio 3’s `Book of the Month’, October 28th, 1997.
`Voice, Technology and the Victorian Ear’. A paper given at the conference on Science and Culture 1780-1900, organised by my colleagues Roger Luckhurst and Jo McDonagh at Birkbeck College on 12 September 1997.
Beckett and Bion. A paper given at the Beckett and London conference held at Goldsmiths College, London in 1997.
Noise. A series of 5 programmes which I wrote and presented on BBC Radio 3. The programmes were produced by Tim Dee and transmitted February 24-28th, 1997. Listen to Noise; Speaking Clocks and Time Machines; Siren Sounds; Transports; Megaphonics
Scribbledehobbles: Writing Jewish-Irish Feet. A paper given at the ‘Culture, Modernity and “the Jew” ‘ conference, Institute of English Studies, 1995.
Family Time. A paper given at the `Who Stole the Family Values?’ conference, May 11, 1996, at Birkbeck College, London.
Some of My Best Friends Are Philosemites. An expanded version of a talk given at the ICA at a panel to mark the publication of The Jew in the Text: Modernity and the Construction of Identity, ed. Tamar Garb and Linda Nochlin (London: Thames and Hudson, 1995).
The War in Truth. A paper given at a colloquium entitled Postmodernism and Truth, held at the University of Sunderland in November 1993.
Virginia Woolf, the Baby and the Bathwater. Introduction to Virginia Woolf, The Years (London: Vintage, 1992).