Literary critic. Comparatist. Electronic music aficionado.#
Chris is a professor of literature in the School of Cybernetics.
After doing a BA at ANU, Chris received honours in English at the University of Melbourne and completed his PhD in Comparative Literature at Monash University. He has been an ARC Postdoctoral Fellows (2009-11) and is currently an ARC Future Fellow (2021-24).
His research operates at the intersection of literary theory, philosophy, science and theology. He calls himself a literary anthropologist and is interested in how literary writers rethink what it means to be human by drawing on other knowledge systems such as religion and science. He is the author of Literature Suspends Death: Sacrifice and Storytelling in Kierkegaard, Kafka and Blanchot (Bloomsbury, 2011) and Animal Fables after Darwin: Literature, Speciesism and Metaphor (Cambridge UP, 2018).
Chris is currently working on an ARC Future Fellowship with the title Future Fables: Literature, Evolution and Artificial Intelligence. This project aims to understand (1) how the post-Darwin literary imagination has shaped our current anxieties about AI and (2) how literary and scientific writers after Darwin rethink the future of the human species by imagining the co-evolution of humans, animals and machines.
On a Friday morning, Chris can be found scrolling through the new music offerings on Apple Music. He has a keen interest in experimental music and has been accused of mistaking the sound of a fridge for interesting music.