معرفی
Leif Weatherby is an Associate Professor of German in the Faculty of Arts and Science at New York University (NYU), serving as founding director of the Digital Theory Lab and Director of Digital Humanities. His work bridges literary theory, digital culture, and historical analysis of scientific paradigms within contemporary academic frameworks.
His research centers on dialectics, semiotics, data ontology, and computing's political economy since the Industrial Revolution, with critical examinations of generative AI as cultural (not cognitive) systems rooted in structuralist linguistics. Current book projects include Artificial Concepts: How Cybernetics Encountered German Idealism and The Mismeasure of Mind: Against the Prediction of Everything (under Norton contract), challenging predictive modeling in behavioral sciences while analyzing German Romanticism's technological metaphysics through works like Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ (2016) and Language Machines (2025).
Weatherby founded NYU's Digital Theory Lab in 2018 as a collaborative space where graduate students and faculty experiment with data science-humanities synthesis, producing outputs like the Critical Inquiry special issue on 'Surplus Data'. His public scholarship appears in Jacobin, Boston Globe, New York Times, and The Point, extending theoretical work into cultural critique while maintaining affiliation with Cornell University's Society for the Humanities as evidenced by institutional listings and email correspondence.
