Peter D. Gaffney

PETER D. GAFFNEY CV

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PERSONAL BIO

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	Peter Gaffney is a native of Seattle, WA, and has also lived in Japan, Italy, Oxford, Prague and Paris. He now resides in Philadelphia, where he is completing a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania (graduating in May 2006). His interests include Deleuze, Lacan, Kant, Spinoza, and Descartes, as well as avant-garde art and literature, French cultural studies and the history of technology. Before beginning graduate work, Peter was Creative Director and partner at Gyroscopic Design & Consulting, a design agency based in Seattle and Los Angeles, and was Art Director for Leo Burnett Prague from 1996 to 1998.

ACADEMIC HISTORY

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	CURRENT PROJECTS AND ACADEMIC WORK
2000-Present	Peter is currently editing a collection of essays under the working title 'Deleuze, Science and the Force of the Virtual'. He has just finished the dissertation 'Demiurgic Machines: The Mechanics of New York Dada' under the supervision of Professor Jean-Michel Rabaté. The thesis explores the genealogy of modernity as a set of aesthetic and cultural practices heavily invested in the metaphorical system of the machine. Specific topics include: machine art; automatism and 'écriture automatique'; scientific discourse in Duchamp's 'Boîte verte'; Rousselian mechanics of desire and the invention of the 'machine célibataire'; intersubjective relations in Surrealism and de Sade; the technology of cinema; Jarry's cyborg, and other dreams of a mechanomorphic body. I am particularly interested in the way machines provide a working model for Modernist — and specifically Dadaist — theories of artistic production, suggesting a 'demiurgic' reorganization of human thought and agency at the level of representation.
	PAST ACADEMIC HISTORY
1988-1999	During his undergraduate studies at Stanford University (B.A. in English with Honors, 1995), Peter spent a year at Magdalen College, Oxford (1993-4), working with Professor Alun Jones of St. John's College. His research at Oxford on the correspondences between Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu and Beckett's prose work led to the thesis ('Malone's Donkey: Beckett's Proustian Complex'), which was nominated for Best Senior Honors Thesis by the Stanford Honors Program Faculty in 1995. Previous to his undergraduate studies, Peter attended college courses at Parson's School of Design, New York, on a summer fellowship (1988).