Luciana Parisi is professor of literature at Duke University. Her research investigates technology and its role in the transformation of culture, aesthetics, and politics.

Parisi's books include Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Biotechnology and the Mutations of Desire (2004), on the impact of advances in contemporary science and information technology on conceptions of sex; and Contagious Architecture: Computation, Aesthetics, and Space (2013), which explores algorithms in architecture and interaction design as a symptom of global cultural transformation. 

Parisi's current research is motivated by the broad question of what philosophy becomes in the era of computational technology. She posits that there has been a demise in philosophy and philosophical thinking in the face of increasingly automated decision-making, leading to a poverty of philosophy and of critique. Due to the fallacies present in automation — which are then cemented through the use of algorithms — we can no longer be sure that thinking equals truth, since all that algorithms do is optimize probabilities.

Parisi visits Berkeley in conjunction with the Townsend Center's Collaborative Research Seminar on “Rethinking Futures." The Fall 2024 seminar enables a group of faculty members and graduate students to collaboratively explore "the future" cross-culturally and across time, especially in light of the many existential threats now facing humanity — including environmental crisis, war, and democracy's sudden fragility.