Wordsmith. Tech historian. Urban gardener.#
Louisa is a researcher at the School of Cybernetics, where she works on histories of electronics, computing, and automation.
Louisa was educated in Auckland and Cambridge. She trained originally in literature, film, and history in New Zealand, with a significant apprenticeship in writing studies. Prior to returning to research in the United Kingdom, she worked as technical author in the software sector. Her professional and academic experience therefore sits at the intersection of the arts and sciences, with a significant emphasis on the history of technology and the phenomenology of sensory engineering. Her PhD thesis examined the genesis and evolution of electronic screens (19th century - present) and their implications for our visual cultures and ways of seeing. Other areas of research interest thus include computer vision, media and art technologies, the cultural constructions of electronic and computational culture, and the portrayal and refraction of technology in visual texts, broadly conceived.
When she is not thinking about the lexical, the graphical, or the technological, she can be found in the garden. She is interested in the rewilding and urban greening movements as ways we might concretely, if modestly, attend to our current ecological crisis.