Chris Danta

Biography

Chris Danta is Professor of Literature and an ARC Future Fellow (2021-24) in the School of Cybernetics at the Australia National University. His research operates at the intersection of literary theory, philosophy, science and theology. He is the author of Literature Suspends Death: Sacrifice and Storytelling in Kierkegaard, Kafka and Blanchot (Bloomsbury, 2011) and Animal Fables after Darwin: Literature, Speciesism and Metaphor (Cambridge UP, 2018). His Future Fellowship, “Future Fables: Literature, Evolution and Artificial Intelligence,” examines how we understand the human by thinking about the coevolution of humans, animals, machines and the environment. He is a member of the AHRC-funded Networking Project, “Rethinking Fables in the Age of Global Environmental Crisis.” He is a past president of the Australasian Association for Literature (2014-21) and now heads the research committee for the Australian University Heads of English. He has been a visiting fellow at the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics (2012) and the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute at Trinity College Dublin (2024).