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 Ontological Difference in European Thought (1948-1968),” recasts avant-garde poetry in relation to late 20th Century French thought and the computer sciences. The theoretical intention of my research is to trace the extent to which the genesis of the concept of ontological difference, à la Derrida and Deleuze, is indebted to French avant-garde poetry and Anglo-American developments in the computer sciences, and the interrelation between these two traditions. I particularly focus on the poets Antonin Artaud, Isidore Isou, Raymond Queneau, and Richard Brautigan. In many ways, my research explores how Western philosophy has adapted to the technological developments of the Silicon Valley and how art, culture, and society has become increasingly analyzed and expressed as networks often devoid of historical and ontological foundations. I also trace how this trend was anticipated by the 20th-century avant-garde movements of Dada, Futurism, and Surrealism, and then distinctly recognized by certain experimental traditions in the 1960s and 1970s. Thematically, my research addresses structuralism, the avant-garde, 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.

Main Research Interests

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

Aesthetic Theory, Complex Systems, Information Studies, Deconstruction

Antonin Artaud, Isidore Isou, Raymond Queneau, Richard Brautigan

Gregory Bateson, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Gilbert Simondon

Conferences/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.