About
Jennifer Rhee is Associate Professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University. She is also core faculty in the Media, Art, and Text PhD Program and Affiliate Faculty in the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Department.
Her research focuses on artificial intelligence and robotics across technology, speculative fiction, and visual and performance art. She is currently working on a book on machine learning and slowness.
She is the author of The Robotic Imaginary: The Human and the Price of Dehumanized Labor (2018) and co-editor of The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth- and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science (2020).
Jennifer Rhee has a PhD from the Program in Literature at Duke University and a BA in English Literature from Princeton University. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, VCU’s Humanities Research Center, Emory University’s Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry, and Pennsylvania State University’s Institute for the Arts and Humanities.
She has taught courses on speculative fiction, media studies, and critical theory. She welcomes advising students working in feminist science and technology studies, media studies, literature and science, and speculative fiction studies.
The term “anthropomorphic attachments” also refers to a method for thinking about, examining, and critiquing AI technologies. According to this method, anthropomorphization, a central organizing concept of AI, cannot be disentangled from dehumanization, because the concept of the human cannot be disentangled from dehumanization.
Fortunati describes the hegemony of immaterial labor through its connection to forms of reproductive labor that were once located primarily within the domestic sphere. In digital capital, labor is increasingly immaterial and precarious as it makes its way outside of both the domestic sphere and the industrial factory.
To this end, we approach science and literature in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as interactive modes of knowledge that carry forward historical practices of speculation, fugitivity, and amateurism.
