Stephanie Polsky

Dr Stephanie Polsky is a scholar of visual culture and media whose research examines how technologies of vision organise perception across histories of empire, race, modernity, and technological change. Moving from eighteenth-century aesthetics and photography to contemporary digital and computational media, her work asks how visual forms make people, environments, and political worlds perceptible, and how inherited structures of representation continue to shape contemporary regimes of seeing.

Her teaching brings visual culture, critical theory, media history, and cultural studies into dialogue with students’ own visual and material practices. Across courses in visual analysis, theory and critique, and British cultural studies, she approaches images not as isolated objects but as forms embedded within wider histories of technology, politics, identity, and everyday life.

PhD Goldsmiths, University of London, in History of Ideas/Visual Cultures

Her most recent book is Whiteness and the Visual Appropriation of Race in 1980s Britain (Routledge, 2025).

Her previous books include The Photographic Invention of Whiteness: The Visual Cultures of White Atlantic Worlds (Routledge, 2023), The Dark Posthuman: Dehumanization, Technology, and the Atlantic World  (Punctum Books, 2022), The End of the Future: Governing Consequence in the Age of Digital Sovereignty (Academica Press, 2019), Ignoble Displacement: Dispossessed Capital in Neo-Dickensian London (Zero Books, 2015), and Walter Benjamin’s Transit: A Destructive Tour of Modernity (Academica Press, 2010).

Her completed book manuscript, Orientalising the Frame: Jewish Whiteness and European Imperial Visual Culture, extends her research on photography, racial visuality, and empire through the unstable positioning of Jewishness within European imperial culture.

Her current research project, Atmospheres Not Our Own: AI, Immersion, and the Ecological Sublime, examines how histories of environmental sensation, racial difference, and colonial visuality persist within machine vision, generative AI, and immersive technologies. Beginning with eighteenth-century British aesthetic thought and the sublime, the project places contemporary computational media within a longer history of perception, classification, and technological vision.

Her writing has also appeared in peer-reviewed journals and edited collections in the US and UK, including work on photography, posthumanism, digital culture, race, and visuality.