Ryan Healey is a postdoctoral researcher at the Digital Humanities Lab at the University of Basel. His research comprises a literary history of abstraction in writing and computation from the seventeenth century to today, from the early English novel to the large language model. He received a Ph.D. in English at New York University, where he was a fellow at the Center for the Humanities and a founding member of the Digital Theory Lab, and an M.Phil. at the University of Cambridge, where he collaborated with the Cambridge Concept Lab. He has worked for Verso Books, the David Graeber Institute, and IBM Research. His research on a computational approach to eighteenth-century genres appeared in Representations, and his essays have been published in Bookforum, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The New Inquiry.