What is Consciousness?

Biography 

Ankhi Mukherjee is Professor of English and World Literatures at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Wadham College. Her most recent monograph, Unseen City: The Psychic Lives of the Urban Poor (Cambridge University Press, 2021), has won Columbia University’s Robert S. Liebert Award for “outstanding scholarship in the field of applied psychoanalysis.” Mukherjee’s second monograph, What Is a Classic? Postcolonial Rewriting and Invention of the Canon (Stanford UP, 2014), was awarded the British Academy Rose Mary Crawshay Prize in English Literature. Her other publications include Aesthetic Hysteria: The Great Neurosis in Victorian Melodrama and Contemporary Fiction (Routledge, 2007), and the collections of essays she has edited, namely A Concise Companion to Psychoanalysis, Literature, and Culture (with Laura Marcus, Wiley-Blackwell, 2015) and After Lacan (Cambridge University Press, 2018). She has recently co-edited (with Ato Quayson) a collaborative volume titled Decolonizing the English Literary Curriculum (Cambridge UP, 2023). Mukherjee has published in PMLA, MLQ, Contemporary Literature, Parallax, and theCambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, and sits on the editorial boards of several peer-reviewed journals. She has been a postdoctoral research fellow of the British Academy (2003-2006), a visiting fellow at the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University (2015), and the John Hinkley (Visiting) Professor at Johns Hopkins University (2019). She was invited faculty at Cornell University’s School of Criticism and Theory in 2019 and Harvard University’s Institute for World Literature (IWL) in 2023 and 2024. At present, Mukherjee has two books under contract. She is writing A Very Short Introduction to Postcolonial Literature in the widely circulated VSI series (Oxford UP, 2025) and Mavericks and Charlatans: Empire, Modernity, and the Authorization of Dreams (Princeton UP, 2026).

Biography 

BA in Philosophy and Cognitive Science from the University of California, San Diego, and my PhD in Philosophy from the University of Chicago. Before moving to Oxford in 2008, I worked for two years as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, located on the central coast of my home state.

Biography 

Chris is a Research Fellow in Ethics and Moral Psychology of Conscious Awareness in Artificial Intelligence at the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, and a research affiliate of HOPE, the Hub at Oxford for Psychedelic Ethics. He is working on the Uehiro Centre’s research project: Counterfactual Assessment and Valuation for Awareness Architecture  (‘CAVAA’)  https://cavaa.eu/. He has a background in philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and the metaphysics of moral patients (PhD, Princeton University). He is currently working on philosophical-ethical and empirical studies of human judgments about conscious awareness in AI systems, especially as that informs considerations of privacy, value alignment, and ethical AI design

Biography

I am a Research Assistant for the Counterfactual Assessment and Valuation for Awareness Architecture (CAVAA) project funded by the European Union. I investigate the perceptions and moral judgements of AI and it’s moral applications, alongside the ethical implications of awareness within AI systems.

Prior to this, I was a Chevening scholar at the University of Edinburgh (2021-2022) where I completed a MSc in Psychological Research.

Biography 

Co-founder and Director of the award-winning creative artist collective Marshmallow Laser Feast (MLF), Robin has directed XR, immersive experiences, virtual production, large-scale installations and live performances. MLF tell stories that untangle, entangle and flavour our reality, blurring the lines between art, immersive experiences, XR and film. In 2021 Robin directed Dream; a collaboration with The Royal Shakespeare Company, Philharmonia Orchestra, Epic Games + Manchester International Festival.

What’s new? A brand new immersive adventure mixing animation, cinema and interaction: Sweet Dreams; a collaboration with writer Simon Wroe & the BFI, debuting at Factory International’s Aviva Studios.