About

I am an Interdisciplinary Professor in the College of Social Sciences at the University of Glasgow in the UK.

My research and teaching furthers interdisciplinary understanding of how and why human society is being transformed by digital tech and media, and the consequences for forgetting, memory, privacy, security, and the nature, experience and effects of contemporary warfare.

I have devoted much of my career to connecting the human and the social/cultural study of remembering and forgetting, learning much through collaborating over a decade with the fantastic cognitive scientist Prof. Amanda Barnier (Macquarie, Sydney). You can find out more about the project online by visiting our project site or reading our opening essay. We have also founded the innovative and exciting Cambridge University Press Journal of Memory, Mind & Media.

I am also fortunate to collaborate with the brilliant artist Shona Illingworth on numerous projects. This includes The Airspace Tribunal established by Nick Grief and Shona. It examines the case for and against a proposed human right: to protect the freedom to live without physical or psychological threat from above, through a series of international public hearings. Our latest publication is Inacessible war: media, memory, trauma and the blueprint.

I also have tried to enable interdisciplinary research through co-founding and editing two further academic journals: Memory Studies (SAGE); and Digital War (Palgrave Springer). 

John Sutton and I edit the groundbreaking Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies book series, with 90 books published in the series since our launch in 2010.

All of my teaching draws on my research, including my M-level course on Media, War & Security, which I have taught for over a decade at Glasgow and which includes students from several masters programmes. I also have created and teach courses on Media, Culture & Memory, and Transformations in Media, Culture & Society as part of the MSc Media, Culture & Society, a programme I designed as an ambitious interdisciplinary interrogation of how we live in and address the urgent issues of today’s digital media age.

My latest book (with Matthew Ford) is: Radical War: Data, Attention and Control in the 21st Century (Hurst/OUP 2022) which examines the digital explosion that has ripped across the battlefield, weaponising our attention and making everyone a participant in wars without end.