The Chicago School of Media Theory > Members > Eduardo de Almeida




Eduardo de Almeida

email: dealmeid@uchicago.edu
homepage: home.uchicago.edu/~dealmeid/

Eduardo de Almeida is a Ph.D. student in the Department of English at the University of Chicago. His research interests include early American literary and cultural production, Asian American literature, and critical theory. His dissertation attends to the poetics of repetition and form in examining the ways in which contingency and contagion are mutually inflected in Asian American literature.

Currently, Eduardo's research is focused on exploring the relationships between modalities of colonizing imperatives in 18th- and 19th-Century transatlantic print and visual culture. As a member of the Assistant Provost's initiative on Technology and Pedagogy, he began developing strategies for promoting recursivity and "lateral learning." He'll be discussing these ideas in a series of presentations for the University of Chicago Center for Teaching and Learning.

During Winter Quarter 2003 and Winter Quarter 2004, Eduardo served as a course assistant for W. J. T. Mitchell's Theories of Media class, where he lectured on posthuman studies and evolutionary epistemology. With regard to theories of media, he is particularly interested in systems theory, as well as questions concerning the mediation (and perhaps medium) of alterity. To draw from Hayles' engagement with Lyotard, what are the "conditions" of (and for) virtually reconstituting race? And, if one likes, what are the terms of misrecognition? Following Kittler, what does it mean for machines to cease to fail the Turing Test? How one could proceed: Hideaki Anno's Neon Genesis Evangelion is, in Eduardo's estimation, one of the most intriguing alternatives to the Matrix series for considering such issues related to evolutionary epistemology, prolepsis, the semiotics of elect, and so on.

A few final things: there sits, atop the list of texts he hopes to never encounter, the following title: "eXistenDing Digits: Transcoding the Anaesthetics of Puppetry." And consistent with his fondness for the music of Black Box Recorder, he takes his personal refrain from the delightfully named band: I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness.


Works

Chicago School Media Theory: Reading List

Courses Under Development: "The Posthuman Condition"

Courses Under Development: "Posthuman Studies, Evolutionary Epistemology"

Courses Under Development: "Virtual Passing, Prosthetic Boundaries, and Alterity Politics"

Media Taxonomy Models: "Towards a Taxonomy of Media"

Media Theory Keywords Glossary: "Building Media Theory"

Theories of Media Lecture (2003): "Posthuman Studies and New Media"

Theories of Media Lecture (2004): "The Posthuman Condition: Prosthetic Boundaries, Alterity Politics, and New Media"