Carleigh Morgan is a Trinity College Research Scholar and first-generation, working-class, international PhD candidate in Film and Screen Studies. Her doctoral research circulates across disciplines but can be situated broadly within media studies and visual culture. Her work explores the historical convergences between computer science, new media, and film to offer reconsiderations of how ‘the digital’ operates within cinema and cinematic technologies. Her research consistently engages with critical theories concerning the automation of vision; digital error; computer-generated modes of abstraction; processes of digital animation; code; computer-generated effects; the periodisation of new media; invisible labour; digital materiality; augmented and virtual reality; and film history. Her archival work on early 20th century computing machines offers an alternative perspective on the historical moment of conversion from analogue film to its digitisation.

Scholarships & Prizes

Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages research grant, 2018

Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages CULP Award, 2017

Trinity College CULP Award, 2017

Trinity College External Research Studentship 2017-2020

King’s College London Global Experiences Award, 2017

LAHP grant for Your Research in the Media: From Pitch to Publication, 2017

LAHP grant for Brexit, Movement, Waste: Three Events on Politics and Performance, 2016

U.S. Fulbright Award, 2013

Junius C. & Eliza P. Brown Scholarship

Winston Salem Foundation Scholarship

Emily Crandall Shaw Scholarship

Wake Forest University Humanities Research Fellowship

Centre for Excellence, Research, Teaching, and Learning Fellowship

Publications (select)

‘Calculated Failure? Towards a Reconsideration of “Glitch Art”’ in APRJA: Machine Feeling (forthcoming)

‘A Pastiche of Failure: Digital Image Corruption and the History of the Simulated Accident’ in Miscommunication: Errors, Mistakes, and the Media, an edited anthology due 2019 (in progress)

 ‘Run Diagnostics? Rethinking the Aetiology of Glitches’, in APRJA: Machine Feeling; A Peer-Reviewed Newspaper, vol. 8, issue 1 (February 2019)

Teaching

This year I have been supervising undergraduates on the comparative CS6 paper (European Cinema). I have also worked as a private instructor in the US, UK, and abroad; taught English as a foreign language at the university level; delivered a university’s first ERASMUS and TEFL curricula; and I have received grant funding to design and run workshops targeting postgraduate students to help them with pitching and publishing academic research in mainstream media.

Conference papers (select)

Retheorising ‘Glitch’: Lessons from Compression Hacking, transmediale, 2019

The Politics of Reproduction in Blade Runner 2049, World Picture, University of Cambridge, 2018

Controlling Machines: Virtual Reality and the Measured Body, University of Cambridge, 2018

Keywords for the Trump Era, European & British Association for American Studies, King’s College London, 2018

Virtual Organs: VR and the Outsourced Body, Embodying Media, University of Cambridge, 2017

Time in the Gig Economy: Flexibility and Crisis, Digital Everyday, King’s College London, 2017

Algorithmic Bias: A Critique of Racism as Programmatic Error, Cambridge Science Festival, 2017

The Posthuman Subject Plays Videogames: A Visual Poem, Cambridge Festival of Ideas, 2016

Invited Lectures (select)

Games Design in Conflict: A Critique of UX Design, Winchester School of Art

Reconsidering “Playbour”, King’s College London

Beyond Representation: Towards Inclusive Design in Videogames, Winchester School of Art

Neoreactionary Thinking: Notes on Conspiracy Culture, King’s College London

Meeting the Machine Halfway: Reading Gameplay Cybernetically, Wysing Gallery, Cambridge

Invited Workshops

Machine Feeling, CRASSH in coordination with Aarhus University, 2019

Genres of the Human: On Sylvia Wynter (with Alexander G. Weheliye), King’s College London, 2019

Post 45: American Criticism and Literature After 1945, King’s College London, 2017

Graph Commons with Jussi Parikka and Burak Arikan, British Library, 2016