Luke G. Sumpter

Hello, my name is Luke. I am a third-year student at the University of Texas at Austin, and I am studying philosophy and history. I am, broadly, interested in aesthetics and philosophy of art. More specifically, I love learning about philosophy of film, philosophy of literature, philosophy of history, causality, literary theory, film theory, memory, ego, illusion, chance, and coincidence. You could say I’m really narrow in my interests.

Recently, I have done work on digital art and authenticity, using work by Linda Hutcheon and Gilles Deleuze to look into whether the digitization of art, both born-digital and physical-turned-digital, carries the same essence and humanity that we see in traditional forms of art like painting or literature.

I love watching movies (specifically going to the movie theater), reading (with special interests in queer fiction), and talking to myself (I get lost). I also have a– for now– unrelated obsession with wind and circles.

In case you are dying to know, my favorite movies are Arrival (2016), her (2014), God’s Own Country (2017), The Power of the Dog (2021), and The Red Shoes (1948). My favorite recent film is probably TAR (2022). The scriptures I keep close in my bag are Whitman and Proust. As for music, I grew up on everything Adele, keeping her songs at the tip of my mouth, and, as a violinist, I have kept Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto and Bach’s Partita no. 2 close, respectively, to my hands. And I couldn’t forget Elgar, who, it seems, is where my mind often wanders.