Mark Hansen teaches cultural theory and comparative media studies in the English department and on the Committee for Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. He is author of Embodying Technesis: Technology Beyond Writing (Michigan 2000), New Philosophy for New Media (MIT 2004), and Bodies in Code (Routledge forthcoming), as well as numerous essays on cultural theory, contemporary literature, and media. His essay, “The Time of Affect, or Bearing Witness to Life” appeared in Critical Inquiry in Spring 2004. He has co-edited The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty and is currently co-editing two volumes: Critical Terms for Media Studies and Neocybernetic Emergence. He is currently at work on three projects: The Politics of Presence, a study of embodied human agency in the context of realtime media and computing, Becoming-Human, an ethics of the posthuman, and Fiction After Television, a study of the novel in the age of digital convergence.