Biography

I am a DPhil candidate in Modern Languages at Jesus College, University of Oxford. Before coming to Oxford, I received a Bachelor of Arts degree from UC Berkeley in Philosophy and Comparative Literature with language concentrations in Chinese and French.  Afterwards, I studied at University College London’s The Bartlett School of Architecture where I received a Masters of Research degree in Architecture and Digital Theory under the supervision of architectural historian Mario Carpo and art critic Frédéric Migayrou. My thesis titled “Structuralism, Schizophrenia, and Schema: The Psychiatric Origins of ‘Folding’ in Contemporary Architectural Theory” was marked with distinction.

DPhil Research

My DPhil thesis, preliminarily titled “Semio-Ecology: An Archeology of Difference in Western Thought (1948-1968),” recasts avant-garde poetry in relation to late 20th Century French Theory, mathematics, and the computer sciences. The theoretical intention of my research is to trace the extent to which the genesis of the concept of difference, à la Derrida and Deleuze, is indebted to French avant-garde poetry and information theory. In many ways, my research explores how Western philosophy and literature has adapted to the technological developments of the Silicon Valley and how art, culture, and society has become increasingly analyzed and expressed as networks devoid of historical and ontological foundations. I also trace how this trend was anticipated by both 20th-century avant-garde movements of Dada, Futurism, and Surrealism, the foundational crisis in mathematics, and cybernetics. From synthesizing these developments in Western Thought, I consider methods of interpretation for certain experimental literary and media traditions from the 1970s and into the present day. Thematically, my research addresses structuralism, mathematical incompleteness, complex systems, concepts in virtual reality, and the emergence of the rhizome in social theory and literary criticism. I study under the supervision of Professor Nikolaj Lübecker.

My research is supported by the Mary Wentworth Kelly Fund.

Main Research Interests

Modern Poetry, Cybernetics, 20th Century Avant-Garde, Architecture

Aesthetic Theory, Complex Systems, Information Studies, Deconstruction

Tristan Tzara, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Antonin Artaud, Isidore Isou

Gregory Bateson, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Gilbert Simondon

Kurt Gödel, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Alan Turing, Claude Shannon

Conferences, Curations, and Speaking Events

Panel Chair, “Cybernetics and the Construction of the Future,” International Workshop Questioning Human Technogenesis, 9 December 2024, Maison Française d’Oxford, organized by Maison Française d’Oxford, ENS-AXA Chair Geopolitics of Risk, and École Normale Supérieure de Paris - PSL University.

Guest Lecturer, “The Motor Content of Images” Postgraduate Seminar Simondon Oxford Seminars, 11 February 2025, St. John's College, University of Oxford, organized by Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages.

Curator, Representation and Displacement in the Avant-Garde. Featuring artists Hélène de Beauvoir, Jean Cocteau, Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, Wassily Kandinsky, Pablo Picasso, and Hugo Vasarely. Taylor Institution, Oxford, 20 February 2025–21 March 2025. Organized by Taylor Institution, Oxford.

Scholarships and Awards

Mary Wentworth Kelly Fund's T. E. Lawrence award (2024-25)