Marion Thain is Professor of Culture and Technology at King’s College London, and Executive Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities. She is co-Chair of the Russell Group Arts and Humanities Deans/PVCs group.

She is also the Chair-Director (and founder) of the Digital Futures Institute at King’s College London.

She began her career as a Junior Research Fellow at Cambridge University, and then worked in English departments at Russell Group universities in the U.K. as Junior Lecturer (Assistant Professor), Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) and then Reader (Full Professor, by research), before moving to New York University as a professor of Arts and Literature and becoming Director of Digital Humanities for NYU. She returned to the UK in 2018.

Email: marion.thain@kcl.ac.uk

Areas of Research Interest:

• technology, modernity, and the production of knowledge
• Aestheticism, Decadence, and the Fin de Siècle
• poetry, poetics, and interdisciplinary aesthetics

Awards and Fellowships:

• Chosen as one of 100 thought-leaders (from across the Commonwealth, all sectors) to represent the potential and the achievements of the Commonwealth at its 75th anniversary (2024).
• Outstanding Scholarly Achievement Award: 2018, New York University
• Visiting Fellowships at: University of Cambridge; New York University; Center for Advanced Studies of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich, Germany.
• Recipient of research-grant awards from the British Academy (U.K.) and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (U.K.) for projects in the fields of literature and/or Digital Humanities
• Overseas Member of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (U.K.) peer-review college, assessing applications for funding in the fields of literature and/or the digital humanities: 2014-17
• Junior Research Fellowship, Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, U.K.

Thoughts on Disciplinarity and Interdisciplinarity:

Videos:

• HEPI report launch event at King’s Policy Institute (26 April 2023): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrhlNYozwk8
• Mapping Attention Studies (15 Nov. 2023): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eC65woMKvlg&list=PLU0ka4iPReX6BKqCwKn3VJhwjxy2IXgzN&index=2
• Living Well with Technology: AI and the Future (16 Jan 2024): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0htrOUhs_A

Text:

• ‘The Evolution of the Humanities’, Higher Education Policy Institute blog (April 2023): https://www.hepi.ac.uk/2023/04/19/the-evolution-of-the-humanities/
• ‘The Humanities in the UK Today: What is Actually Going on?’ Lead author, co-written with a group of UK leaders in the Humanities (Higher Education Policy Institute Report no. 159, March 2023): https://www.hepi.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/The-Humanities-in-the-UK-Today-Whats-Going-On.pdf
• ‘Radical Interdisciplinarity’; Times Higher Education (18 July, 2021): https://www.timeshighereducation.com/blog/post-pandemic-recovery-requires-radical-interdisciplinarity
• ‘The Arts and Humanities: Shaping the Future’; a blog post for Advance HE: https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/news-and-views/arts-and-humanities-shaping-future (November 2020).
• ‘English’; a blog post for the Institute of English studies (School of Advanced Study, University of London): https://englishstudies.blogs.sas.ac.uk/2020/11/24/english/  (24 November, 2020).
• ‘A View from the United States:  the Crisis in the Humanities; the Liberal Arts; and English in the Military Academy’, in English: Shared Futures, ed. Robert Eaglestone and Gail Marshall (Boydell and Brewer, 2018).

Recent Public Engagement

• Directing and convening the public Thought-leadership programme in the Digital Futures Institute at King’s: ‘Living Well with Technology’. The inaugural lecture was given by Stephen Fry on 12 September 2024: ‘AI: The Means to an End or a Means to the End?’
• ‘Bella Baxter and the Machine‘, Artificial Intelligence, Women and the Arts: Los Angeles Review of Books: 10 June 2024.
• Panel member at ‘Twin Transition Century: The role of digital research for a successful Green Transition of Society’ (20th March 2024; The Norwegian Ambassador’s Residence, London).
• Panel member at ‘AI: will it (really) change the way we look at agriculture, industry and services?’ Festival dell’economia di Trento – London event (7 March 2024).
• Respondent at the launch event of The Guild of European Research-Intensive Universities’s Insight Paper on the Twin Transitions: ‘The Twin Transition Century: The role of Digital research for a Successful green transition of society?’ by Morten Daehlen (21 Sept 2023; Norway House, Brussels).
• ‘There are Challenges but also Potential Benefits of Digital Distractions’ (2022): https://theconversation.com/there-are-challenges-but-also-potential-benefits-of-digital-distractions-177296 Also in The Independent https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/benefits-digital-distraction-generation-goldfish-b2032197.html
• Advisor/interviewee for the original podcast opera ‘Veritable Michael’, a work by the Shadow Opera Company about ‘Michael Field’ (the incredible aunt and niece couple who found fame under the male pseudonym in the late nineteenth century): https://www.shadowopera.com/veritable-michael (Summer 2021). See a blog post here: https://www.stagingdecadence.com/blog/veritable-michael
• Interview for “Conseil National du Numérique” [“French Digital Council”] on the attention crisis (September 2021); summary given here:  https://cnnumerique.fr/index.php/comprendre-lattention-pour-faciliter-laction-collective-4-questions-marion-thain Cited in their national policy report: ‘Your Attention, Please!’ (‘Votre Attention, S’il Vous Plaît!’) https://cnnumerique.fr/votre-attention-sil-vous-plait-quels-leviers-face-leconomie-de-lattention.