Kanta Dihal

Dr Kanta Dihal is Lecturer in Science Communication at Imperial College London and Associate Fellow of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge. In her research, she focuses on the stories we tell about science and technology across cultures, and how they help us think about ethics and bias in new technologies.

Kanta was Principal Investigator on the project Global AI Narratives from 2018-2022, in which she explored intercultural public understanding of artificial intelligence as constructed by fictional and nonfictional narratives. Kanta’s work intersects the fields of science communication, literature and science, and science fiction. She has a PhD in science communication from the University of Oxford: in her thesis, ‘The Stories of Quantum Physics,’ she investigated the communication of conflicting interpretations of quantum physics to adults and children.

She is co-editor of the books AI Narratives: A History of Imaginative Thinking About Intelligent Machines (Oxford University Press, 2020) and Imagining AI: How the World Sees Intelligent Machines (Oxford University Press, 2023) and has co-authored a series of papers on AI narratives with Dr Stephen Cave, including ‘The Whiteness of AI’ (Philosophy and Technology, 2020). She is currently writing the book Stories in Superposition. For more of her publications, see the Publications page.

Kanta has advised organizations including the World Economic Forum, the UK House of Lords, the G20, and the United Nations on portrayals and perceptions of AI.

Research Interests

• Literature and science, 1900-present
• Science fiction
• Modernism
• Postmodernism
• Children's literature, 1900-present
• Science communication
• Postcolonial, decolonial, and critical race theory