Katherine Hayles is Distinguished Professor of english and media studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research interests concern topics related to literature and science in the 20th and 21st century; 20th and 21st century American fiction; electronic textuality, hypertext fiction and theory; science fiction; literary theory; and media theory. With degrees in both chemistry and English literature, Hayles is one of the foremost scholars of the relationship between literature and science in the late twentieth century. She is the author six books, including How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics (1999), which won the Rene Wellek Prize for the Best Book in Literary Theory for 1998-1999; and Writing Machines (2001), which won the Suzanne Langer Award for Outstanding Scholarship. Her most recent book is Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary (2007). The winner of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, two NEH Fellowships, a Rockefeller Residential Fellowship at Bellagio, and a fellowship at the National Humanities Center, Hayles is currently working on study of narrative and database