Apolline Taillandier

Biography

Dr Apolline Taillandier is a political theorist and historian specialising in the history of Anglo-American transhumanism, liberalism, and feminist thought from the postwar period onwards. Apolline was trained in political theory at Sciences Po in Paris. From 2016 to 2021 she was a doctoral fellow at the Max Planck Sciences Po Center on Coping with Instability in Market Societies, where she worked under the supervision of Prof Jenny Andersson. She was also a Fulbright visiting fellow at the University of California, Berkeley Sociology Department and a CamPo visiting student at the Department of Politics and International Studies at Cambridge. Apolline is currently a postdoctoral research associate at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence and POLIS at Cambridge and at the Center for Science and Thought at the University of Bonn. She is also affiliated with the Center for European Studies at Sciences Po. Dr Apolline Taillandier is currently researching the history of artificial intelligence from the 1960s onwards, focusing on the ways feminist ideas have influenced projects in computer programming and computer education. She is also completing a monograph entitled In the Name of Posthumanity on the intellectual history of postwar transhumanism. Recent publications include ‘From Boundless Expansion to Existential Threat: Transhumanists and Posthuman Imaginaries,’ in Jenny Andersson and Sandra Kemp (eds.), Futures (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 333-348, ‘“Staring into the Singularity” and Other Posthuman Tales: Transhumanist Stories of Future Change,’ History and Theory 60, no. 2 (June 2021), 215-233, and ‘AI in a Different Voice: Rethinking Computers, Learning and Gender Difference at MIT in the 1980s,’ in Jude Browne, Stephen Cave, Eleanor Drage, and Kerry McInerney (eds.), Feminist AI: Critical Perspectives on Algorithms, Data, and Intelligent Machines (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023).