About

I hold a personal chair in AI, MEMORY & WAR, at the University of Edinburgh, UK.

From September 2025, I will lead WarShare, an ERC awarded, UKRI-funded (€2.25M) five year research project on digital participation in war.

New books include:

SHARDED MEDIA: Trump’s Rage Against the Mainstream (Palgrave 2025) (with William Merrin)

THE REMAKING OF MEMORY IN THE AGE OF THE INTERNET AND SOCIA MEDIA (OUP 2024) (Co-editor with Qi Wang)

My recent book on digital participation in war with Matthew Ford is:
RADICAL WAR: Data, Attention and Control in the 21st Century (Hurst/OUP 2022).

See also my latest article on AI & MEMORY.

My research and teaching furthers interdisciplinary understanding of how and why human society is being transformed by AI, 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 100 books published in the series since our launch in 2010.