R. John WIlliams

R. John Williams is an Associate Professor of English, Film and Media, at Yale University. His academic work has focused on international histories of Buddhism, technological innovation and the perceived difference of racial and cultural otherness. His book, The Buddha in the Machine: Art, Technology, and The Meeting of East and West (Yale University Press, 2014), examines the role of technological discourse in representations of Asian/American aesthetics in late-nineteenth and twentieth century film and literature. The book won the 2015 Harry Levin Prize from the American Comparative Literature Association. He just completed a manuscript titled A Critique of Mindfulness (University of Chicago Press), which details the rise of a new metaphysics of presence that has emerged within the multi-billion dollar wellness industry–a metaphysics with important consequences in how we read literature and philosophy today. A new essay, “Surface Writing,” re-examines the trope of writing in Sigmund Freud’s famous essay on the “Mystic Writing Pad” as a model for consciousness and is forthcoming in Representations.