School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemMinds, bodies, machines: essays in the cultural and intellectual history of technologies( 2008)In 1989 Rodney Brooks, Director of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Laboratory at MIT, predicted that America would soon be able to conduct inter-planetary exploration and colonisation with millions of tiny robots. Asserting that ‘biology and evolution were good models to follow’, Brooks designed his ‘gnat robots’ as insects, each with sensor-whiskers, six legs, and a sophisticated microchip. In terms of risk management and optimisation of resources, the superiority of ‘swarms’ of mass-produced, cheap and autonomous robots over a single large and expensive ground-controlled robot was obvious. In conclusion Brooks argued that, just as exploration of the Earth had ‘proceeded by many small spontaneous sorties into the unknown’, so ‘with imagination and verve we can invade the whole solar system’. Futuristic as this may sound, there is nothing new in the MIT Lab’s imaginative blurring of the boundaries between the organic (the insect) and the mechanical (the robot). In the seventeenth century, inspired by the new science of magnification, observers noted the startlingly close resemblance between insects and ‘Engines’. Insect interiors were, Richard Leigh declared, ‘Like living Watches, each of these conceals / A thousand Springs of Life, and moving Wheels’. For another observer, the ‘pretty Engines’ of ‘Insectile Automata’ housed ‘all the perfections of the largest Animals’, including the human machine.
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ItemJanet Schaw and the Complexions of Empire(John Hopkins University Press, 2003)This essay considers the development of racial ideology in the eighteenth century in the context of a comparative colonial cultural history of the British West Indies and of North America. It focuses on the racialization of whiteness in the 1760s and 1770s and on the way in which this racialization of skin color relates to issues of gender. Janet Schaw's Journal of a Lady of Quality(1774-6) is the principal text for this enquiry. The concluding section of the paper argues that mid-eighteenth-century discourses of whitening and whiteness form an important cultural context for understanding later abolitionist texts.