Last week I had the pleasure of visiting the University of Tulsa, where communications theorist Ben Peters is working on his manuscript on efforts to build a Soviet Internet. Ben is also initiating students into the rigors of critical communication studies and planting the seeds of Teutonic thought in the fertile, young American minds. I spoke with Ben's students about my work, gave an evening lecture on "new" "German" media theory and its relationship to American pragmatism, and rapped at length with his welcoming colleagues. Thanks to their penetrating suggestions I came away with a boatload of references to Hume, Adam Smith, Herder, and others who need to be incorporated into some of my efforts to reconceptaulize the relationship among media, culture, and technology within the traditions of Anglo-American liberalism. I also joined Ben for an interview with the local public radio station. I haven't had so many good meals and good conversations in such a short time in years.

Tomorrow I'll speak to the University of Chicago's New Media Working Group about some of the same topics (new German media theory on the concept of Kulturtechniken).  Back in the day I took some transformative courses on media theory at Chicago so I feel honored to be making a return visit. I feel deep affinities with those folks (even if most members of the working group probably started their graduate studies long after I moved to France and Germany). I'll be back down there a week or two later to talk about Lévi-Strauss and cybernetics, too. The day after that talk I fly to the East Coast, where I'll spend a few weeks in New Haven and NYC doing research for my project on "technical media and self-writing apparatuses in the 19th century," and I'll also give a talk at the "Now! Visual Culture" conference at NYU.

And last but not least, this Tuesday I'll defend my dissertation. If you're in the neighborhood, feel free to stop by:

You are cordially invited to Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan's defense of his dissertation “The Cybernetic Apparatus: Media, Liberalism, and the Reform of the Human Sciences” on May 1st at 10:00 AM in room 109 of Annie May Swift Hall (Evanston, IL).

This will be in partial fulfillment of the Ph. D. requirements of the Screen Cultures Program (Northwestern University) and the Fakultät Medien (Bauhaus University).

In the German-style, the defense will be open to the public. Samuel Weber, Bernhard Siegert, Jennifer S. Light, and Ken Alder will serve as examiners.