Robin Manley

I am a PhD candidate in the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley, with affiliations to the Program in Critical Theory and the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, & Society. I am an editorial board member, and former Coeditor in Chief, of Qui Parle, a journal of critical humanities and social science. My research is focused on the intellectual history and philosophical legacy of cybernetics, especially its relation to twentieth century debates over materialism and humanism. More broadly, I work across post-Kantian philosophy, modern intellectual history, digital media theory, and science and technologies studies.

Prior to Berkeley, I spent the 2020-2021 academic year as a graduate student in History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. I also spent two years as an editorial assistant at the University of California Press, working on books in modern history, American studies, and environmental studies.

I received my bachelors with honors in the department of Modern Culture & Media at Brown University, where I studied modern intellectual history and critical theory. At Brown, I was also a managing editor for the College Hill Independent, a lead coordinator for Space in Prisons for Art and Creative Expression, and a staff writer at the Brown Political Review.

My email is robin.manley@berkeley.edu


Publications

“The Disunity in Genealogy: Foucault’s Anti-Nietzschean Reading of History,” Theory, Culture & Society. OnlineFirst: March 18, 2025. Open access.

Review of: Code: From Information Theory to French Theory, by Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan. History of Social Sciences 1, no. 1 (2025): 162-165. Open access.


Public Writing

“Language and Image Minus Cognition”: An Interview with Leif Weatherby, Journal of the History of Ideas Blog: June 11, 2025. Online.