COMPARATIVE LITERARY STUDIES PROGRAM

José Chavez is a third-year PhD student in the program of Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University. Interested in a range of fields from media theory, literary studies, philosophy, to mathematics and science studies, his primary research focuses on global intellectual histories of cybernetics and information theory—with a particular interest in its development in the Americas and Japan—and the ways that artists and intellectuals have encountered and imagined ideas of the human and the animal, the organic and the inorganic, the animate and inanimate, and possible social and political worlds through theories of computation and cybernetics. His research leads into questions of media and/in modernity, animation, the intersection of mathematics and art, and theories of perception and observation.

José received his BA in Comparative Literature from Binghamton University. Other research and teaching interests include film theory; literary modernisms; Marxist and critical thought; and psychoanalysis.