R. John Williams is Associate Professor at Yale University where he teaches in the departments of English and Film and Media Studies. He is the author of The Buddha in the Machine: Art, Technology and the Meeting of East and West (Yale University Press, 2014), which examines the role of technological discourse in the development of Asian religious experience in the United States and Europe. The book won the 2015 Harry Levin Prize for Best Book from the American Comparative Literature Association. His recent work has focused on new theories of time that emerged in the second half of the twentieth centuries, particularly in the rise of futurology and theories of “presence.” An article from this new project has appeared in Critical Inquiry and another is forthcoming in a volume titled Futures (forthcoming from Oxford University Press, 2019). Before his turn to history, he was trained in critical theory, philosophy, and comparative literary theory at the University of California, Irvine, where he earned his Ph.D. in 2008. He currently teaches on subjects of philosophies of time, spirituality, literature and technology, and American literary diversity.