Simon Porzak

Academic Program Affiliation(s): Language and Thinking Program

Biography: Simon Porzak, bio note

Simon Porzak (B.A. Cornell University; PhD in Rhetoric, University of California, Berkeley) is co-director of the Undergraduate Writing Program at Columbia University, where he developed the University’s first curriculum on reading and writing in the Data Sciences. His research studies the intersections between science and aesthetics, in particular computer simulations of thought, biomechanics, opera, fin-de-siècle literature, affect, gender, sexuality, and video games. His essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Diacritics, Opera Quarterly, Symploke, and Unwinnable: Life With Culture. He is currently preparing two book-length manuscripts for publication: Anima Automata: Feeling Technology and the Olympian Art of Song, on the artificial emotional intelligence programming of singing dolls from Les Contes d’Hoffmann to Kylie Minogue; and Against “Against Nature”: Decadent Darwinisms, on the evolutionary biology of Huysmans, Rachilde, Proust, Lovecraft, and Ballard.

Phone: 845-758-7141
Website: https://languageandthinking.bard.edu/
Email:
Department: Language and Thinking Program