Dr James Dutton is a lecturer in English and Media Studies in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at UNSW Canberra, University of New South Wales. He earned his PhD from the English department in the School of the Arts & Media at UNSW Sydney in 2018. His doctoral research on Marcel Proust’s novels in relation to poststructuralist thinkers Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze formed the basis of his book Proust Between Deleuze and Derrida: The Remains of Literature, published by Edinburgh University Press in 2022. From 2017 to 2023, Dutton held casual teaching positions in Media Studies, English, and Creative Writing at UNSW Sydney while working full-time at the Opera Bar in the Sydney Opera House during his PhD studies. His trajectory into academia reflects a non-traditional path, informed by practical experiences outside formal academic structures.

Dutton’s research centres on literary theory, with a focus on Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu to explore the potentialities of writing. He investigates how these concepts apply to contemporary culture, particularly the prevalence of information—distinct from knowledge, which engages the body, languages, the unconscious, and subjectivity—and phenomena such as automatic society, algorithmic governance through social media, drive-oriented marketing, and populist politics that foster alienation. He promotes a university grounded in care, dialogue, and inventive knowledge production amid automation. Key publications include DEAD WRITE: mourning proust's signature in Angelaki (2018), Objective Breathing: Peter Sloterdijk’s Atmospheric Mediation in Cultural Politics (2022), Techniques of the Human in Proust, via Houellebecq in CLCWeb (2022), Politics Is a Language Google Will Never Know (2024), A Future Happening: The Man Without Qualities (2025), and reading Bernard Stiegler to reinvent athletic gesture (2025).

Professional Email: j.dutton@unsw.edu.au