Wendy Hui Kyong Chun: My Mother Was a Keypunch Operator

In this public lecture, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, the Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media, will take on an experimental approach to weave together the personal, theoretical and political in order to grapple with the complicated relationship between gender, feminism, race, migration and technology.

Moving from her mother’s experience as a keypunch operator, her own experiences in engineering and the aftermath of the Montreal massacre, Chun's talk will address how we inhabit each other through our experiences and actions.

Biography

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is Simon Fraser University's Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media in the School of Communication. She has studied both systems design engineering and English literature, which she combines and mutates in her current work on digital media.

She is the author of Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (MIT Press, 2006), Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (MIT Press, 2011), and Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (MIT Press, 2016).

She has been a visiting scholar at the Annenberg School at the University of Pennsylvania, a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University and held fellowships from the Guggenheim, ACLS, the American Academy of Berlin, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. 

She has been the Velux Visiting Professor of Management, Politics and Philosophy at the Copenhagen Business School; the Wayne Morse Chair for Law and Politics at the University of Oregon; a visiting professor at Leuphana University in Luneburg, Germany; and a visiting associate professor in the History of Science Department at Harvard, of which she is an associate.