Sue Thomas

OFFICIAL BIO
Sue Thomas is Research Professor of New Media in the Institute of Creative Technologies, Faculty of Art, Design & Humanities at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK. Her most recent book is the cyberspace travelogue 'Hello World: travels in virtuality' (2004). Other publications include the novels 'Correspondence' (short-listed for the Arthur C Clarke Award for Best Science Fiction Novel 1992) and 'Water' (1994); an edited anthology 'Wild Women: Contemporary Short Stories By Women Celebrating Women' (1994), and 'Creative Writing: A Handbook For Workshop Leaders' (1995). She has published extensively in both print and online, and has initiated numerous online writing projects including The Noon Quilt, now an iconic image of the early days of the web. She founded the trAce Online Writing Centre in 1995 where she was Artistic Director until going to De Montfort in January 2005. She leads the Transliteracy Research Group with Kate Pullinger, and supervises a number of PhD students working in new media related areas. Her social media projects have included the NLab Network, CreativeCoffee Club, and Amplified Leicester, a city-wide experiment in social media. Her research interests include transliteracy, social media, and transdisciplinarity, and she co-manages the DMU Transdisciplinary Common Room. She is currently writing 'Technobiophilia: Nature and Cyberspace', a study of the relationships between cyberspace and the natural world www.technobiophilia.com

PERSONAL HISTORY
Sue Thomas was born in 1951 in Rearsby, a small village just outside the city of Leicester, UK. Her parents were both of Dutch nationality and during her growing up they moved around England a great deal while her father had a number of jobs including Rank Xerox photocopier salesman and life underwriter. Sue herself also pursued a varied career, including fine art student, accounts clerk, bookseller, and self-employed machine-knitter, before entering academia as a mature student in 1985. She discovered computers that same year, began writing about them, and published her first novel, the cyborg romance 'Correspondence', in 1992. She returned to live in Leicester in 2004 when she accepted a Professorship at DMU. Her pastimes include playing with her grandsons; visiting any seaside; swimming; wandering around California and, of course, wandering around cyberspace.

Contact
Professor Sue Thomas
Clephan 1.01d
Faculty of Art, Design & Humanities
De Montfort University
The Gateway, Leicester LE1 9BH UK
+44(0)116 207 8266
sue.thomas @ dmu.ac.uk