Register here

The Humanities Research Center is excited to host VCU's first Humanities Symposium. This inaugural event will showcase the vital research and creative work of our faculty and students across the humanities and humanistic social sciences. This symposium celebrates interdisciplinary collaboration and highlights the diverse methodologies, perspectives, and innovations that emerge when scholars work across traditional disciplinary boundaries, bringing together insights from literature, history, philosophy, languages, the arts, cultural studies, and beyond.

Keynote Description

What is AI? A Humanities Perspective 

How do we define AI? Where did AI come from? What do we mean by AI today? The talk will introduce key concepts about AI, share its history, and address the generative turn in AI from a humanities perspective. 

About the Speaker

Lauren Tilton, Ph.D. is the E. Claiborne Robins Professor of Liberal Arts and Digital Humanities and Director of the Center for Liberal Arts and AI (CLAAI)  at the University of Richmond. She specializes in computational approaches to studying 20^th and 21^st century visual culture. Her most recent co-authored books include Distant Viewing: Computational Exploration of Digital Images (MIT Press), Humanities Data in R 2nd Edition (Springer), and Computational Humanities (University of Minnesota Press). Her award-winning scholarship has received funding from the American Council of Learned Societies, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Mellon. She is Editor-in-Chief of Computational Humanities, an open access journal with Cambridge University Press. She is President of the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH), the scholarly association for digital humanities in the United States, and President of the Association of Digital Humanities Organization (ADHO), the global DH association. She earned her Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University. 

Event Schedule

9:00 - 9:45 a.m. Breakfast - coffee and pastries

9:30 - 9:45 a.m. Opening Remarks - HRC Director Cristina Stanciu; Dean Catherine Ingrassia, VCU College of Humanities and Sciences

10:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m. Panel: The Future(s) of the Humanities: Interdisciplinary Student research projects at the HRC Humanities Labs
(Moderated by Elizabeth Fagan, Dept. of Focused Inquiry, and Sarah Meacham, Dept. of History)

• 10:00 a.m.: Rylee Lawson, “AI, Efficiency, and the Spirit of Productivism in Education,” Dylan Lackey, “Teaching the Theoretical Humanities as a Graduate Student/Humanities in the Public”
• 10:30 a.m.: Victoria Vidal, “Reflections on the East Marshall Street Well Oral History and Memorialization Project," Anthony Bui, “Where Joy Still Lives”
• 11:00 a.m.: Mia Velasquez, Kiari Harris, Jonathan Lopez, “Student voices from the Latino Virginia Project” 
• 11:20 a.m.: Eleanor Harris, Anupama Nair, Abbey Ellerglick, Sean Reed, James Burns, Charlotte Addison (AI Futures Lab Fellows and Critical AI VIP students), “Histories of Alternate AI Futures”

12:00 p.m. - 2:00 p.m. Lunch and Keynote: What is AI? A Humanities Perspective, Dr. Lauren Tilton, E. Claiborne Robins Professor of Liberal Arts and Digital Humanities and Director of the Center for Liberal Arts and AI

2:00 - 4:00 p.m. Panel: Humanities Research at the Crossroads: Interdisciplinary Projects from Faculty at the HRC Labs
(Moderated by Adin Lears, Dept. of English, and Ryan Smith, Dept. of History)

• 2:00 p.m.: Jesse Goldstein, HRC Environmental Humanities Lab, “AI, Data Centers and a Just Digital Transition”
• 2:30 p.m.: Daniel Morales, Gabriela León-Pérez, and Saltanat Liebert, HRC Migration Studies Lab, “Community engaged research”
• 3:00 p.m.: Amy L. Rector, Gabriel A. Reich, Meghan Z. Gough, Rory S. Dunn, HRC Memory Studies Lab, “Finding the Thread: Memory as a Transdisciplinary topic at VCU”
• 3:30 p.m.: Christine Cynn and Michael Dickinson, HRC Health Humanities Lab, “Faculty Reflections on the East Marshall Street Well Oral History and Memorialization Project”