Graduate Student Directory

- Title
- PhD Candidate
- Division Humanities Division
- Department
- History of Consciousness Department
- Mail Stop History Of Consciousness
- Courses HUMN 25: Humans and Machines, HISC 122: What is the Psyche?, HISC 80: War and Media (History of Cybernetics)
Research Interests
Cybernetics, History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, Psychoanalysis, STS, Aesthetics, Critical Theory
Biography, Education and Training
M.A., Center for the Study of Theory and Criticism, Western University
B.A. (hons), Visual and Critical Studies, Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD University)
Won Jeon is a PhD candidate in the Department of the History of Consciousness at University of California, Santa Cruz. Her current research project offers an intellectual history of cybernetics, psychoanalysis, and their mutual historical origins in nineteenth-century laws of energy and heat. Focusing on these two foundational twentieth-century theories of "mind" and its organization, Won’s dissertation probes the conflict between prolific branches of technoscience developed out of early cybernetic engineering and the epistemological insights about the nature of communication, accumulation, and learning buried in cybernetic ways of thinking. In the process, her project sheds light on the entangled lineages of cybernetics and psychoanalysis in early modern scientific thought and the fate of the "information age" revealed today by artificial intelligence and the political economy of information. At its center lies the relationship between "learning" and "intelligence," on the one hand, and the contradictions and mysteries of the curative efficacy of knowledge, on the other.
Won works closely with the Gregory Bateson papers held at the UCSC Special Collections and Archives Library, with permission from the Bateson Idea Group (BIG).
Honors, Awards and Grants
2024 Science and Justice Research Center The SNU in the World Program, administered by the Office of International Affairs (OIA) at Seoul National University, Research Fellowship
2023 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Humanizing Technology Teaching Fellowship
2023 Center for Innovations in Teaching and Learning (CITL) Graduate Pedagogy Fellowship
2022 Robert Cavooris Memorial Award for Community Activism, UC Santa Cruz
2022 The Humanities Institute, University of Santa Cruz Summer Research Fellowship
2019-2020 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Canada Graduate Scholarship—Masters
2018 Governor General’s Academic Medal, silver medal for highest achivement in a bachelor degree program
2018 OCAD University Medal, Visual and Critical Studies
Selected Publications
“From Automation to AI: The Informatization of Labor." Qui Parle, Vol. 22, No.4 (Forthcoming December 2024).
“Everything, Everywhere, All at Once: Techno-Orientalism in an Age of “Cybernetic Capitalism.” Techno-Orientalism Vol. II: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and Media. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. Edited by David S. Roh, Betsy Huang, Greta Niu. (Forthcoming 2024).
“Second-order recursions of first-order cybernetics: An ‘experimental epistemology.” Open Philosophy (2022); 5: 381-395. Topical Issue: (Neo)Cybernetic Paths for an Epistemology of Digital Cultures. https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/opphil-2022-0207/html
“The boundaries that constitute us: Parasite and the illusion of solipsism in pandemic times.” Artnodes, No. 26 (2021): NODE 26. Art in the Time of the Pandemics. https://www.raco.cat/index.php/Artnodes/article/view/373958
“Panta Rhei and the Persistence of Old Premises: A Metalogue between Heraclitus and Marcus Aurelius.” The Scattered Pelican, 2019 Issue “Matters of Fact.” (October 2019).
Selected Presentations
"Project for a Cybernetic Psychology: The Freudian Origins of Informatics." History of Science Society Annual Meeting, Merida, Mexico. November 7-10, 2024.
“Technology, Race, Gender." American Literature Association (ALA) Annual Conference 2023, Boston, MA. May 25-28, 2023.
“Techno-Orientalism Evolves: Asianized Futures in Contemporary Film, Television, and Games.” Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) Annual Conference 2023, Long Beach, CA. April 6-9, 2023.
“A confluence of epidemiology and epistemology” The Humanities & the Age of COVID: ‘Disruption, Hesitation, Silence’: 2021 Georgetown University EGSA Conference. April 30, 2021.
Teaching Interests
HUMN 25: Humans and Machines
HISC 122: What is the Psyche?
HISC 80S: War and Media (History of Cybernetics)