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Marion Thain

Marion Thain is Director of Edinburgh Futures Institute, and Professor of Culture and Technology at the University of Edinburgh.

She began her career as a Junior Research Fellow at Cambridge University. Later she moved to New York University as a professor of Arts and Literature and becoming Director of Digital Humanities for NYU. She returned to the UK in 2018 as Professor of Culture and Technology, and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, at King’s College London. At King’s, she founded and led the Digital Futures Institute. She became Director of the Edinburgh Futures Institute in January 2025.

Email: [first name].[surname]@ed.ac.uk

Areas of Research Interest:

  • Attention Studies (technology and the crisis of distraction)
  • The Future University (disciplinarity, interdisciplinarity and new infrastructures of knowledge)
  • Culture, Modernity, Psychology, and Technological Revolution

Awards and Fellowships:

  • Awarded FEA: Fellowship of the English Association (2025).
  • Chosen as one of 100 thought-leaders (from across the Commonwealth, all sectors) to represent the potential and the achievements of the Commonwealth at its 75th anniversary (2024).
  • Outstanding Scholarly Achievement Award: 2018, New York University
  • Visiting Fellowships at: University of Cambridge; New York University; Center for Advanced Studies of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich, Germany.
  • Recipient of research-grant awards from the British Academy (U.K.) and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (U.K.) for projects in the fields of literature and/or Digital Humanities
  • Overseas Member of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (U.K.) peer-review college, assessing applications for funding in the fields of literature and/or the digital humanities: 2014-17
  • Junior Research Fellowship, Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, U.K.

Engagement

The Future University (videos and text):

  • ‘The Humanities must continue to evolve to best protect their future’, Times Higher Education 24 March 2025
  • Panel member at ‘Twin Transition Century: The role of digital research for a successful Green Transition of Society’ (20th March 2024; The Norwegian Ambassador’s Residence, London)
  • Respondent at the launch event of The Guild of European Research-Intensive Universities’s Insight Paper on the Twin Transitions: ‘The Twin Transition Century: The role of Digital research for a Successful green transition of society?’ by Morten Daehlen (21 Sept 2023; Norway House, Brussels)
  • ‘The Evolution of the Humanities’, Higher Education Policy Institute blog (April 2023)
  • ‘The Humanities in the UK Today: What is Actually Going on?’ Lead author, co-written with a group of UK leaders in the Humanities (Higher Education Policy Institute Report no. 159, March 2023)
  • ‘Radical Interdisciplinarity’; Times Higher Education (18 July, 2021)
  • ‘The Arts and Humanities: Shaping the Future’; a blog post for Advance HE (November 2020)
  • ‘English’; a blog post for the Institute of English studies (School of Advanced Study, University of London)  (24 November, 2020)
  • ‘A View from the United States:  the Crisis in the Humanities; the Liberal Arts; and English in the Military Academy’, in English: Shared Futures, ed. Robert Eaglestone and Gail Marshall (Boydell and Brewer, 2018)

Attention/Distraction, Digital, AI