Haerin Shin received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at Stanford University, working on contemporary American, Korean and Japanese literature, culture, critical theory and other forms of media such as film, animation and graphic narratives. Her research focuses on ontology and technology, cognitive literary theory, psychoanalytic criticism, cyborg theories, the posthuman, speculative fiction, and Asian American literature. Shin is currently completing a book entitled Dialectic of Spectrality: A Transpacific Study on Being in the Age of Cyberculture, 1945~2012, in which she notes that the advent of computers, the internet and networked mobile devices throughout the latter half of the 20th century has brought abstracted flows of data to the fore of social interaction and communication. With ghost-like images flickering on computer screens, disembodied voices in phone conversations flying all over the globe, and faceless chat windows occupying our daily lives, the touch and feel of physical interaction appears to have lost its necessity, burying us in fragmented sensory inputs and free-floating information. The greater body of critical and scientific scholarship produced so far has seen this proliferation of immaterial, digitally codified data as either an evolutionary triumph of technology or a deterioration into a cold, inhuman dystopia. In this book, subverting the two contending views’ premise that material agents could be divorced from the content of consciousness and knowledge, Shin asserts that electronic telepresence and communication technology in fact reinstates, rather than denies, the significance of fragmented, transgressive and incomprehensible modes of being as crucial constituents of human existence.

ontology and technology, cognitive literary theory, psychoanalytic criticism, cyborg theories, the posthuman, speculative fiction, and Asian American literature

received a Ph.D. degree from the Department of Comparative Literature at the Stanford University