“My portrait was taken in the Bacon Room. I research new media technologies and cultural change, exploring historical as well as future forms of technological life, so this seemed appropriate. I brought along a Purma camera that speaks to these interests. It’s made of Bakelite and is an example of an ‘old’ new technology; it would once have been seen as rather modern, not least because it was mass-produced, and now looks thoroughly retro. It still takes pictures, if you can find the film. I liked the idea of bringing a camera into a shoot and letting one visual apparatus speak to another.”

Caroline Bassett is Professor of Digital Humanities in the Faculty of English and the Director of Cambridge Digital Humanities (CDH), an inter-disciplinary research programme. She explores computational technologies and cultural forms, critical theories of technology, and media arts. Her current interests include science fiction and technological futures, media archaeology and digital methods, automation and AI. Books she has written include the Arc and the Machine, on narrative and new media, Furious, a co-authored monograph on feminism, gender and digital worlds. She has recently completed Anti-Computing a book exploring histories of resistance to computerized culture, to be published in 2021. She joined Cambridge in September 2019.