I’m a writer and professor based in San Francisco and Santa Cruz. My new book is called Ways of Seeing After Dark. My first book was A Theory of Assembly: From Museums to Memes. I teach at UC Santa Cruz in a department called History of Art and Visual Culture, or HAVC. I have a longstanding obsession with birds. I’m now also obsessed with the moon.

Academic bio:

Kyle Parry researches the contemporary visual world. With a focus on the United States, he studies forms and experiences we mistake as secondary.

Parry's new book, Ways of Seeing After Dark (2026), contends that darkness is not absence but presence, shaping how worlds are sensed, inhabited, and understood. Darkness brings peril, but it is also a fundamental, if increasingly threatened, condition of living together on this planet. The book examines how fear of darkness is built rather than universal and how such training intersects with broader social structures, including racism and capitalism.

His first book, also published by the University of Minnesota Press, was A Theory of Assembly: From Museums to Memes (2023). Mapping the recent prevalence of assembly as a distinctly relational cultural form, A Theory of Assembly has been reviewed in Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Film Quarterly, Visual Studies, International Journal of Communication, Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft, and FOCUS: Papers in English Literary and Cultural Studies.

Parry also coedited Ubiquity: Photography's Multitudes (2021), a book of new essays on the history and theory (and critique) of photographic ubiquity. His essay "Metadata Is Not Data About Data" has been used by media theorists, scholars of information, and practitioners. His research has been published in Critical Inquiry, Debates in the Digital Humanities, and Archive Journal.