Speaker: Professor James Smithies
Co-Chairs: Prof Joy Damousi and Prof Peter Beilharz
Convener: A/Prof Rachel Busbridge

Friday 1 August 2-4pm AEDT. Followed by Light refreshments 4-5pm

Location: MEL-421.3.06, Level 3, Room 6, St Teresa of Kolkata Building, 115b Victoria Parade, Fitzroy, ACU Melbourne Campus & online via Teams

This event is presented by The National School of Arts and Humanities at Australian Catholic University and Thesis Eleven Journal. To RSVP or for more information please use the contact form at the bottom of this page.

We are living in an era of digital modernity that amounts to a recursion of earlier periods of colonialism, hyper-capitalism, and great power competition. This talk will explore the implications of this, defining and then framing digital modernity in the context of post-Enlightenment history and pluralistic critical theory. This is less of a stretch than it sounds. From its inception in the seventeenth century modernity was not a simplistic outgrowth or export from Western Europe, or consistently good or bad, just as contemporary digital technology is not a simplistic outgrowth of Silicon Valley. Modernity has always been a complex of ideas, politics, technology, and culture experienced by different people at different times, in different places, and in different ways. We can define digital modernity in a similar way, as a multiplicity of interlocking and sometimes opposed modernities. These geographically dispersed digital spaces range from tiny groups engaged in crime on the dark web to vast national and transnational milieux enabled by global digital platforms, not unlike the “swarms” referred to by Zygmunt Bauman. They spring into being in viral ways and contain the seeds of innumerable threads from the past and present, from the public sphere to colonialism. Accepting that we live in digital modernity presents us with important opportunities to effect social and political change. By rehabilitating our relationship to the past, we can learn to walk the fine line between revolution and reaction again.

James Smithies is Professor of Digital Humanities and director of the HASS Digital Research Hub at the Australian National University. From 2015 – 2024 he was founding director of King’s Digital Lab, at King’s College London. James is a historian of culture, ideas, and technology with expertise in Research Software Engineering (RSE). In his digital practice he applies computational tools and methods to arts, humanities, and social science subjects. He has published journal articles across history, literary criticism, social science, and digital humanities. His first book The Digital Humanities and the Digital Modern was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2017. A co-edited volume with Alan Liu and Ursula Pawlicka-Deger titled Critical Infrastructure Studies and Digital Humanities will be published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2026. His monograph Digital Modernity: Why We Need to Think Historically About the Digital Age is in a late stage of development.

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