Nancy Katherine Hayles (born 1943) is an American scholar who focuses on the interconnections "between science, literature, and technology". Originally a research chemist in the 1960s, she then earned her doctorate in English literature and became a distinguished professor. In the humanities, her work, How We Became Posthuman (1999) is a seminal foundation for posthumanism. In literary criticism, she is most notable for her contribution to the fields of literature and science, particularly American literature. Throughout her work, (from the 1970s through 2025), Hayles has examined how humans interact with technology and media. She explores how digital technologies affect humanities research. As one of the early and leading scholars of electronic literature, Hayles introduced digital literature concepts to a generation of scholars and writers (such as M.D. Coverley and Stephanie Strickland) in the 1990s through her courses for the National Endowment of Humanities.
Hayles was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2015 and elected to the Academy of Europe the same year. As of March 2025, she is a Distinguished Research Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles and the James B. Duke Professor Emerita from Duke University.
Life and education Hayles was born in Saint Louis, Missouri to Edward and Thelma Bruns.
She received her Bachelor of Science in chemistry from Rochester Institute of Technology in 1966, followed by a Master's of Science degree (M.S.) in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology in 1969. She worked as a research chemist in 1966 at the Xerox Corporation and as a chemical research consultant Beckman Instrument Company from 1968 to 1970.
Hayles then switched fields and received her Master's of Arts (MA) degree in English literature from Michigan State University in 1970, and her Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in English literature from the University of Rochester in 1977.
She married William Hayles, July 26, 1969 (marriage ended, 1979) and had two children: Lynn Hayles Rathjen and Jonathan Hayles. She later married Nicholas Gessler, August 6, 1994.
Career After earning her PhD, Hayles taught as an instructor at Dartmouth College (1975–76) and then as an assistant professor of English (1976–1982). Afterwards, she moved to the University of Missouri–Rolla, as an assistant professor of English (1982–85) and from there to the University of Iowa, where she taught as an associate professor, (1985–89) and as the Millington F. Carpenter Professor of English (1989–92). Hayles then became the Hillis Professor of Literature in English and Media Arts at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) (1992–2008). After this distinguished professorship, she moved to Duke University and was a professor of English and Literature at (1992–2018), when she retired as the James B. Duke Distinguished Professor Emerita of Literature. She then returned to UCLA, where she has held an appointment as Distinguished Research Professor of English from 2018.
In addition to her faculty positions, Hayles has been a visiting scholar at several prestigious academic institutions, including the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena where she served as a visiting associate (1979–80) and a visiting associate professor (1988), and at Tulane University, New Orleans, where she was the Mellon Distinguished Visiting Professor (1994).
Hayles has also been an active executive in multiple boards, including her work as a member of the executive committee, Literature and Science Division, (1988–92); and chair of prize committee (1997) for the Modern Language Association of America; President for the Society for Literature and Science (1991–93). She was the faculty director of the Electronic Literature Organization from 2001 to 2006. Since then, Hayles has served on the Electronic Literature Organization's Literary Advisory Board.
Hayles has delivered multiple keynotes, including the HCAS Fellows Symposium for the University of Helsinki in Spring 2019.
Major works
How We Became Posthuman
This seminal book explains how the lines between human and technology are blurring. Hayles traces the history of cybernetics and technology, helping to define and introduce the term "posthuman."
Writing Machines This 2002 work explores the literary dimensions of new media. This work introduces "first-, second- and third-generations hypertexts, or technotexts" as Hayles terms them. Grigar quotes Hayles to summarize that "thus, Writing Machines is not just about electronic texts produced in these days of post-humanity, but also 'what the print book can be in the digital age'". Hayles argues that cyberculture should "help us rethink the relationships between form and content, more specifically between the material aspects of the medium used and the generated content". Symons claims that "Hayles argues that a text's instantiation in a particular medium shapes it in ways that cannot be divorced from the meaning of its "words (and other semiotic components)". This print book itself is designed as a technotext. As Koskimaa described in Electronic Book Review, "Writing Machines is the second release in The MIT Press's new Mediawork Pamphlet Series, which pairs leading writers and contemporary designers to produce pamphlets involving emergent technologies that are accompanied by exclusive WebTakes". Most of the footnotes for this work were not in the actual book but were online as a WebTake.
How We Think Her 2012 work How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis, is concerned with how digital media is accepted in academia, particularly the humanities and social sciences. As Jenell Johnson, professor of the Rhetoric, Politics, and Culture program at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, describes, "It is at once an account of the theoretical and technical development of the digital humanities, an argument for its symbiotic relationship to traditional, print-based scholarship, and a demonstration of how its analytical affordances can help us to think differently about texts, as well as the scholars who seek to interpret them". Joseph Lloyd Donica, a professor of English at Bronx Community College, City University of New York, with numerous publications in his field, writes describing how "Hayles states that her book 'explores the proposition that we think through, with, and alongside media'". He goes on to note that Hayles discusses "the implications [emphasis mine] of media upheavals within the humanities and qualitative social sciences as traditionally print-based disciplines such as literature, history, philosophy, religion, and art history move into digital media". In this work, Hayles extrapolates "technogenesis" as we move from the age of print to digital. Christoph Raetzsch notes that "How We Think is organized around the term technogenesis, by which Hayles means "the idea that humans and technics have coevolved together"See Donica quotes Hayles as claiming that "the ability to access and retrieve information on a global scale has a significant impact on how one thinks about one's place in the world".
As Robert Schaefer explained in his New York Journal of Books review, Hayles postulates that there are two mistaken reactions to digital media in academia: No big deal or outright rejection and calls to "initiate a new branch of academic inquiry: comparative media studies". Hayles advocates for two strategies: assimilating digital scholarship into existing pedagogy and distinguishing digital scholarship that "emphasizes new methodologies" and "research questions."See
Unthought
This 2017 book Unthought: The Power Of The Cognitive Nonconscious explores relationships between human cognition and technology.Horner, Sam. Academy of Management Learning & Education. Sep2020, Vol. 19 Issue 3, p428-431. 4p. DOI: 10.5465/amle.2020.0312
Bacteria to AI This 2025 book examines cognition in the modern world where AI and media and humanity are merging. This work further develops Hayles integrated cognitive framework, exploring meaning-making practices from non-human perspectives, from bacteria to AI, and including plants and animals.
Overall theories Hayles's work is concerned with the interface of changing technologies and traditional culture, as Christoph Raetzsch, a post-doctoral scholar in media and communication studies, explains: "Since the 1970s, N. Katherine Hayles has been exploring the zones of contact between the cultural formations of technology and the technological basis of culture". Sherryl Vint further explains these interstices from Hayles background in both chemistry and literature as Hayles has "always been concerned with combining the two cultures of the sciences and the humanities".
Materiality of information The structure of the printed book, Writing Machines itself as an artist book, or "technotext" embodies Hayles's contention that how we receive information determines our thinking about the information, as Jan Baetens explains: "material structure which not only helps us to think and write, but which determines our thinking and writing in every possible way". Baetens is Emeritus Professor of Cultural Studies at KU Leuven, known for his interdisciplinary work in word-and-image studies. He notes that "Maybe the most interesting thing about Writing Machines, however, is its '' dimension, that is the fact that the book not only says what it does, but also does what it says".
In terms of the strength of Hayles's arguments regarding the return of materiality to information, several scholars expressed doubt on the validity of the provided grounds, notably evolutionary psychology. Keating claims that while Hayles is following evolutionary psychological arguments in order to argue for the overcoming of the disembodiment of knowledge, she provides "no good reason to support this proposition". Brigham describes Hayles's attempt to connect autopoietic circularity to "an inadequacy in Maturana's attempt to account for evolutionary change" as unjustified. Weiss suggests that she makes the mistake of "adhering too closely to the realist, objectivist discourse of the sciences", the same mistake she criticizes Weiner and Maturana for committing.
Cognition Hayles is concerned with cognition, as Punday quotes Hayles "She offers this definition: 'Cognition is a process that interprets information within contexts that connect it with meaning. In How We Think, Hayles "argued for connections between cognition, technology, humanity, and evolution".See Hayles distinguishes between cognizers (e.g., living thinking beings and some computational media) and non-cognizers or material processes (e.g., mountains eroding). As Punday goes on to quote "Hayles distinguish[es] between what she calls cognizers and noncognizersSee ... [a]s she explains, "The crucial distinguishing characteristics of cognition that separate it from these underlying processes are choice and decision, and thus possibilities for interpretation and meaning. A glacier, for example, cannot choose whether to slide into a shady valley as opposed to a sunny plain".
Embodiment