Dennis Song

Dennis Song is a Ph.D. student in the Program in the History of Science and Medicine entering Fall 2025. His research historicizes planetary/climate and digital (hyper)connectivity in 20th- and 21st-century political-intellectual thought. He is partly interested in how automation and affective technologies (e.g., cradles, Instagram, Saturn V) from the Interwar period to the present changed the ways people narrate, use, and disown history.

Part of his work puts archival methods together with conceptual studies in the philosophy of technology, aesthetics, and the philosophy of history. Among the authors he engages are Hannah Arendt, Bernard Stiegler, and Elizabeth Povinelli, whose writings he theorizes and historicizes the usefulness and uselessness of seeing the environment as media, especially the layering/thickening of time in space or environment.

Dennis earned a B.S. in Conservation & Resource Studies and a B.A. in Rhetoric from UC Berkeley in 2025. His undergraduate thesis examined Bruno Latour’s version of the Gaia hypothesis as an extension of the Hobbes–Schmittian Leviathan. From 2022 to 2025, he was a member of the UC Berkeley Tourism Studies Working Group (TSWG), in which he developed a keen interest in tourism and leisure anthropology.