Prof Sarah Dillon, Faculty of English
Biographical Information
Email: sjd27 [at] cam.ac.uk
I read English at Clare College, Cambridge, graduating in 1998. I went on to gain an M.A. in Philosophy and Literature from the University of Warwick in 1999 and a D.Phil. in English from the University of Sussex in 2004. I taught at the University of St Andrews for eight years, from 2006-2014, first as a Lecturer and then Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Literature. I joined the Cambridge Faculty of English in 2014, where I am now Professor of Literature and the Public Humanities.
I am the General Editor of the book series Contemporary Writers: Critical Essays (formerly Gylphi, now Routledge) and serve on the editorial boards of Public Humanities, C21: Journal of Twenty-First Century Writing, Fantastika, and Journal of Social and Cultural Possibilities.
I have held leadership positions as Director of the Cambridge AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership, as a Programme Director at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, as the Faculty's Director of Postgraduate Studies, and as Chair of the British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies. I am currently part of the Academic Advisory Network for Cambridge's Centre for Gender Studies. I sit on the Management Committee of CRASSH and on the Management Board of the Bennett Institute for Public Policy.
I have received funding awards for collaborative research and/or research impact projects from the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the Royal Society, the Templeton World Charity Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the University of Cambridge's Arts and Humanities Impact Fund, and CAPE (Capabilities in Academic Policy Engagement). From May 2020 to December 2021 I was co-PI, with Dr Richard Staley (History and Philosophy of Science), of the University of Cambridge Mellon Sawyer Seminar - 'Histories of Artifical Intelligence: A Geneaology of Power'. In the 2024-25 academic year I am the receipient of a Leverhulme Research Fellowship to advance research on my next book, provisionally entitled Literature and Artificial Intelligence: Rhetoric, Influence and Epistemology.
Research Interests
I am a scholar of twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature, film and philosophy, with a research focus on the epistemic function and role of stories, on interdisciplinarity, and on the public humanities. My work takes place at sites of intersection and interconnection, between disciplines and fields (literary theory and criticism, narratology, literature and science studies, science fiction studies, film studies, continental philosophy, feminist theory and criticism), and between sectors (academia, media, and government). I locate my work at such sites in order to analyse, theorise and perform the specific modes of thought and knowledge offered by literature and film, and the humanities more broadly.
My current areas of active research interest are:
- Literature and Science
My current book project - Literature and Artificial Intelligence: Rhetoric, Influence and Epistemology - historicises current AI hype by revealing the literary nature of the origins of Western AI science, both in terms of the speculative rhetoric of the founding papers, as well as the direct influence of literature on mid-twentieth-century AI researchers, many of whom also produced their own creative writing. The project uses the conjunction of literature and AI to pursue the question of the cognitive value of literature, what forms of knowledge it makes available, and how these have both been excluded from the formalisation of 'reason' in AI science, and can offer a productive site for the interrogation of the epistemic and ontological injustices of AI. Case studies include Alan Turing, J. C. R. Licklider, Joseph Weizenbaum, John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky. This research draws on and develops my collaborative work over the past 5 years or so on AI Narratives, on the History of AI and on storylistening.
- Narrative and Policy
I am an expert on narrative and the use of humanities evidence in policy, with particular expertise in relation to artificial intelligence and climate change. Storylistening: Narrative Evidence and Public Reasoning, co-authored with Dr Claire Craig, former Director of the UK Government Office for Science, makes the case for the value of attention to stories, and the importance of understanding their functions and effects, in the context of high-level decision-making and policymaking. The book identifies four relevant functions of stories in this context. Stories can offer alternative points of view, create and cohere collective identities, function as narrative models, and play a crucial role in anticipation. Storylistening demonstrates how literary and other narratives function in this way in relation to four areas of public decision-making and reasoning where decisions are strongly influenced by contentious knowledge and powerful imaginings: climate change, the economy, nuclear power, and artificial intelligence. Together with Dr Craig and Dr Alex Tasker, the storylistening work continues beyond the book, in further publications, engagements, and exploratory practical projects, with a view to establishing PINE (Plural, Interdisciplinary and Novel Evidence) across high-level decision-making. The storylistening website is updated regularly to reflect this ongoing work.
Areas of Graduate Supervision
I supervise postgraduate students, and mentor postdoctoral students, working on twentieth and/or twentieth-first century literature, flm or culture, who share any of my research interests. I am particularly interested in supervising projects that build on or extend the work presented in Storylistening in a theoretical and/or practical capacity.
I am currently supervising doctoral projects on: science fiction film and the philosophy of narrative identity; feminist revisionist literature; queer cultural memory and contemporary literature; and planetary memory in queer speculative fiction. Doctoral projects with a specific policy focus, deploying the storylistening framework, include a project analysing the complexity of the AI alignment problem through AI narratives to complement AI strategy research, and a storylistening-based study into narratives of coercive and controlling behaviour across contemporary texts, and the interactions of those narratives with public reasoning.
Previous doctoral projects supervised have investigated: the parallel text in post-1960s feminist art writing; contemporary British novels and twenty-first century conspiracy theories; the role of techno-companions and embodied AI in stratifying assignments of humanness; the speculative archive in African American literature, culture and history; queer young adult fiction; Ian McEwan and phenomenology; sex in contemporary literature; William Gibson and the gestalt; literature of the anthropocene; the aestheticisation of failure in contemporary cultural theory and production; and contemporary dystopian fiction.
Current PhD Students: Claudia Cornelissen, Aaron Muldoon, Nichole Anderson Ravindran, Sonji Shah, Kerry Shanahan, Sarah Woodward
Current Postdoctoral Mentees: Dominic Walker
BBC Broadcasting and Partnership
In 2013 I was selected as an Arts and Humanities Research Council & BBC Radio 3 New Generation Thinker and thereafter have broadcast regularly on BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4. I co-created, wrote and presented the documentary series Literary Pursuits on Radio 3 from 2016-2019, and the Close Reading feature on Radio 4’s Open Book from 2014-2016. I also brokered and managed the University of Cambridge's partnership with the BBC on the National Short Story Award, and with the BBC and First Story on the Young Writers' Award and Student Critics' Award from 2017-20, and brokered the renewal of the partnership with the BBC (2020-23). Details of all my public and media activities can be found on my website and blog.
Selected Publications
Books:
- authored
Storylistening: Narrative Evidence and Public Reasoning, with Claire Craig (London: Routledge, 2021)
Deconstruction, Feminism, Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018)
The Palimpsest: Literature, Criticism, Theory (London: Continuum, 2007)
- edited
AI Narratives: A History of Imaginative Thinking about Intelligent Machines, co-ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020)
Maggie Gee: Critical Essays, co-ed. (Canterbury: Gylphi, 2015)
David Mitchell: Critical Essays, ed. (Canterbury: Gylphi, 2011)
Journal Special Issues:
‘Histories of Artificial Intelligence: A Genealogy of Power', BJHS Themes 8 (2023), ed. with Syed Mustafa Ali, Stephanie Dick, Matthew Jones, Jonnie Penn, Richard Staley.
‘Imagining Derrida’, Special Issue of Derrida Today 10:2 (2017), ed. with John Schad.
Articles and Chapters:
'How To Do Evidence Synthesis', with Alex Tasker and Claire Craig, The How-To Issue, Public Humanities, forthcoming.
‘Measuring Bullshit in the Language Games played by ChatGPT’, with Alessandro Trevisan, Harry Giddens, Alan F. Blackwell, arXiv preprint
'Histories of Artificial Intelligence: A Genealogy of Power', with Syed Mustafa Ali, Stephanie Dick, Matthew Jones, Jonnie Penn, Richard Staley. BJHS Themes 8 (2023): 1-18.
‘“Storylistening” in the science policy ecosystem’, with Claire Craig, Science 379.6628 (2023): 134-6.
'Storylistening: How narrative evidence can improve public reasoning about climate change', with Claire Craig, WIREs Climate Change 14.2 (2023): 1-9.
'Public Criticism', Textual Practice 37.11 (2023): 1648-1669.
'What AI Researchers Read: The Role of Literature in Artificial Intelligence Research', with Jennifer Schaffer-Goddard, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 48.1 (2023): 15-42.
‘Storylistening: a case study in how to include the humanities in evidence provided for public reasoning’, with Claire Craig, Journal of the British Academy 10 (2022): 21-28.
'Feminist Fiction and Forms of Empowerment', in Empowering Contemporary Fiction in English: The Impact of Empowerment in Literary Studies, ed. Ralf Hertel and Eva-Maria Windberger (Leiden: Brill, 2021), pp. 19-38.
‘Futures of Autonomous Flight: Using a Collaborative Storytelling Game to Assess Anticipatory Assumptions’, with Olivia Belton, Futures 128 (2021): 1-13.
'The Eliza Effect and its Dangers: From Demystification to Gender Critique’, Journal for Cultural Research 24.1 (2020).
‘Who Rules the World?: Reimagining the Contemporary Feminist Dystopia’, in New Feminist Literary Studies, ed. Jennifer Cooke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. 169-181.
‘Artificial Intelligence and the Sovereign-Governance Game’, with Michael Dillon, in AI Narratives: A History of Imaginative Thinking about Intelligent Machines, ed. Stephen Cave, Kanta Dihal and Sarah Dillon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), pp. 331-54.
'Introduction: Imagining AI', with Cave and Dihal, in AI Narratives: A History of Imaginative Thinking about Intelligent Machines, ed. Stephen Cave, Kanta Dihal and Sarah Dillon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), pp. 1-21.
'The Horror of the Anthropocene’, C21 Literature: Journal of 21st Century Writings 6.1 (2018), Special Issue: The Literature of the Anthropocene. Open access, available here.
‘On the Influence of Literature on Science’, Configurations 26.3 (2018), Special Joint Issue with Journal of Literature and Science: State of the Unions (Part 2): 311-16. Available here.
‘David Mitchell’, in The Routledge Companion to Twenty-First Century Fiction, ed. Daniel O'Gorman and Robert Eaglestone (London: Routledge, 2018), pp. 372-82.
‘English and the Public Good’, in English: Shared Futures, ed. Robert Eaglestone and Gail Marshall (Martlesham: Boydell and Brewer, 2018), pp. 194-201.
‘Derrida and the Question of “Woman”’, in Derrida and Queer Theory, ed. Christian Hite (Brooklyn: Punctum Books, 2017), pp. 108-130. Open access, available here.
‘Cinematic Incorporation: Literature in My Life Without Me’, Film Philosophy 19 (2015): 55-66. Open access, available here.
‘Literary Equivocation: Reproductive Futurism and The Ice People’, in Maggie Gee: Critical Essays, ed. Sarah Dillon and Caroline Edwards (Canterbury: Glyphi, 2015), pp. 101-132.
'Beyond the Blue: The Sorrowful Joy of Gee’, with Caroline Edwards, in Maggie Gee: Critical Essays, ed. Sarah Dillon and Caroline Edwards (Canterbury: Glyphi, 2015), pp. 1-29.
‘“Talking about the same questions but at another rhythm”: Deconstruction and Film’, in The First Sail: The Cinema of J. Hillis Miller, ed. Dragan Kujundzic (Open Humanities Press/University of Michigan Online Publications, 2015), pp. 86-101. Open access, available here.
‘It is a Question of Words, Therefore’: Becoming-Animal in Michel Faber’s Under the Skin’, Science Fiction Studies 38.1 (2011): 134-54. Open access, available here.
‘Chaotic Narrative: Complexity, Causality, Time and Autopoiesis in David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten’, Critique 52.2 (2011): 135-62. Open access version, and link to official publication, available here.
‘Introducing David Mitchell’s Universe: A Twenty-First Century House of Fiction’, in David Mitchell: Critical Essays, ed. Sarah Dillon (Canterbury: Gylphi, 2011), pp. 3-23.
‘Time for the Gift of Dance’ in Sex, Gender and Time in Literature and Culture, ed. Ben Davies and Jana Funk (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 109-131.
‘Imagining Apocalypse: Maggie Gee’s The Flood’, Contemporary Literature 48.3 (2007): 374-97.
‘Palimpsesting: Reading and Writing Lives in H.D.’s Palimpsest’, Critical Survey, Special Issue: Modernist Women Writers Using History, ed. Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewllyn, 19.1 (2007): 29-39. Open access version, and link to official publication, available here.
‘Life After Derrida: Anacoluthia and the Agrammaticality of Following’, Research in Phenomenology 36 (2006): 97-114. Open access version, and link to official publication, available here.
‘Re-inscribing De Quincey’s Palimpsest: The Significance of the Palimpsest in Contemporary Literary and Cultural Studies’, Textual Practice 19.3 (2005): 243-263.
Reports:
Reading the Stars: Narrative Evidence for Space Strategy, with Claire Craig and Alex Tasker, September 2024.
AI and Gender: 5 Proposals for Future Research, The Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, June 2019
Portrayals and Perceptions of AI and Why They Matter, The Royal Society, December 2018
