Stephanie Polsky
Visiting Assistant Professor
Biography
Dr Stephanie Polsky’s interdisciplinary teaching and research explore the intersections between Visual Cultures, Critical Theory, Media Studies, and Cultural Studies.
Her course focuses on the interrelated ecologies of visual culture, art and media production, political representation, public perception, and their relation to collective values and individual identities.
Her research investigates the visual histories of empire and the technologies, from eighteenth-century aesthetics and photography to contemporary digital media, that have organised modern regimes of perception.
Education
PhD Goldsmiths, University of London, in History of Ideas/Visual Cultures
Publications and Projects
Her most recent book is entitled Whiteness and the Visual Appropriation of Race in 1980s Britain (Routledge, 2025). Her previous books include The Photographic Invention of Whiteness: The Visual Cultures of White Atlantic Worlds (Routledge, 2023), The Dark Posthuman: Dehumanization, Technology, and the Atlantic World (Punctum Books, 2022), The End of the Future: Governing Consequence in the Age of Digital Sovereignty (Academica Press, 2019), Ignoble Displacement: Dispossessed Capital in Neo-Dickensian London (Zero Books, 2015), and Walter Benjamin’s Transit: A Destructive Tour of Modernity (Academica Press 2010).
Her publications span visual culture, photography, posthumanism, media theory, and digital sovereignty.
In addition to these publications, her writing has appeared in several peer-reviewed journals and critical anthologies in the US and UK, where she critically evaluates new technological forms of art and media for their effects on perception and imagination, and their influence on race, gender, and national identity.