Philip Grant

ToftH Researcher

Philip Grant is a Los Angeles-based researcher at Transformations of the Human, investigating how artificial intelligence and machine learning deployed in financial markets might challenge long-established notions of human intuition, judgment, and experience. He is an anthropologist and historian who was previously Research Fellow in the Social Studies of Finance at the University of Edinburgh, where he drew on both field research and his own earlier career as an equity fund manager to write a co-authored book on investment management entitled Chains of Finance (OUP). As part of that project, he worked with artists Goldin+Senneby, publishing an account of this collaboration in e-flux. He has also been a Persian-English translator and editor of academic works on Middle Eastern history, and is convinced that any enquiry into the human must operate in constant translation between as many languages as possible. He studied at Oxford, Sciences-Po Paris, and the University of California Irvine, where his PhD research was based on collaborative fieldwork with Iranian-American feminist activists.