Dan O’Hara is a philosopher and literary critic who is Lecturer in English and American Literature at the University of Cologne, and Head of Research and Development at Philter Phactory. He was editor of Thomas Pynchon: Schizophrenia & Social Control, and the ongoing Concordance to the Works of Deleuze and Guattari; and he was organizer of the legendary cyberphilosophy Virtual Futures conferences in the mid-1990s. His next book Extreme Metaphors: Selected Interviews with J. G. Ballard, 1967–2006, co-edited with Simon Sellars (London: Fourth Estate, 2012) is part of a wide-ranging collaborative project encompassing a number of works both by and about Ballard, monographs, and collections. His most recently published literary criticism deals mainly with Ballard, Samuel Beckett, trauma, irony, and apocalypse; his current philosophical research, and forthcoming monograph, deals with the concept of skeuomorphism as a theory of nonhuman agency in the evolution of objects and ideas.