Ryan Healey

Ryan Healey is a postdoctoral researcher at contralab and the Digital Humanities Lab at the University of Basel. His research in literary history, media theory, and the theory of computation asks how writing systems from the long eighteenth century to contemporary language models have determined the forms that abstraction takes and what information can be made to do. He received a Ph.D. in English at New York University, where he was a fellow at the Center for the Humanities and a founding member of the Digital Theory Lab, and an M.Phil. at the University of Cambridge, where he collaborated with the Cambridge Concept Lab. He has worked for Verso Books, the David Graeber Institute, and IBM Research. He co-organizes the Language of Language Machines working group, which surfaces the historical and philosophical freight carried by the technical vocabulary of natural language processing. His research on a computational approach to eighteenth-century genre appeared in Representations, and his essays have been published in Bookforum, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The New Inquiry.