— Video

On March 29, 2018, Despina Kakoudaki delivered a fascinating talk, “Unmaking People: The Politics of Negation from Frankenstein to Westworld,” given at the University of King’s College, Halifax as part of the Automatons lecture series. She argued that “artificial people” in fiction and film from Frankenstein through to Ex Machina and Westworld serve as foils for examining “human” emotions, traumas, rights and identities.

The lecture is available in video format at the King’s College website. You can also listen to Dr. Kakoudaki talk with Alex Mason, producer of the CBC radio show Mainstreet, in an interview about “what fiction teaches us about our creations, our anxieties and ourselves.”

Dr. Kakoudaki is Professor of Literature and Director of the Humanities Lab at American University (Washington, DC) and she is author of Anatomy of a Robot: Literature, Cinema, and the Cultural Work of Artificial People (2014).