What do the humanities offer when the human has been decentered, if not entirely replaced, by technologies of artificial intelligence and artificial life? To what extent are the humanities being tested, expanded, energized, or obscured by their growing intersection with the sciences and social sciences today?
In this workshop, scholars from art history, data science, history of science, literature, and rhetoric explore the notion of “models” as a particular way of understanding the modes, methods, and shapes that responses to these challenges have taken, both historically and today. Through interdisciplinary dialogue, the event will thematize the varied and often conflicting ways that models produce relationships, including with the realities and entities they purport to describe.
Convened by Lindsay Caplan (History of Art and Architecture) and Debbie Weinstein (American Studies). Presented by the Collaborative Humanities Lab “Models-Scale-Context: AI and the Humanities” at the Cogut, led by Holly Case and Suresh Venkatasubramanian.
Free and open to the public. For questions or to request special services, accommodations, or assistance, please contact humanities-institute@brown.edu or (401) 863-6070.
Speakers
- David Bates (University of California, Berkeley)
- Holly Case (Brown University)
- Jacob Gates Foster (Indiana University)
- Tung-Hui Hu (University of Michigan)
- Juliet Koss (Scripps College)
- Tara Suri (Harvard University)
Schedule
| 9:30 am – 10:00 am |
Coffee and Breakfast Available
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| 10:00 am – 10:15 am |
Opening Remarks
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| 10:15 am – 11:45 am |
Panel 1: Model as Method
- Tung-Hui Hu, “The Black Box Problem Revisited, or Models to Interpret Media”
- Jacob Gates Foster, “Models Are Prostheses for Exploring the Possible”
- Respondent: Suresh Venkatasubramanian
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| 1:00 pm – 2:30 pm |
Panel 2: Epistemological Models: Architecture, Art, Artificial Life
- Juliet Koss, “Model Mode”
- David Bates, “Epistemologies of the Virtual”
- Respondent: Holly Case
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| 2:30 pm – 3:00 pm |
Coffee Break
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| 3:00 pm – 4:30 pm |
Panel 3: Human as Model / Modeling the Human
- Tara Suri, “Modeling ‘The Human’ Over the End of Empire”
- Holly Case, “Shocked into Modeling”
- Respondent: Xan Chacko
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| 4:30 pm – 5:00 pm |
Closing Remarks
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About the Speakers
David W. Bates is a professor in the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley, an affiliate with the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine and Society, and past director of the Berkeley Center for New Media. He earned his Ph.D. in European history from the University of Chicago. His research and teaching are focused on the relations between technology and cognition, and the history of political and legal thought. His most recent book is An Artificial History of Natural Intelligence: Thinking with Machines from Descartes to the Digital Age (University of Chicago Press, 2024). He has previously published two books on early modern thought — Enlightenment Aberrations: Error and Revolution in France (Cornell University Press, 2002) and States of War: Enlightenment Origins of the Political (Columbia University Press, 2011) — and edited (with Nima Bassiri) Plasticity and Pathology: On the Formation of the Neural Subject (Fordham University Press, 2015).
Holly Case is a professor of history and the humanities at Brown University and is co-leader of the inaugural collaborative humanities lab “Models-Scale-Context: AI and the Humanities” at the Cogut Institute. She is a historian of modern Europe whose work focuses on the relationship between foreign policy, social policy, science, and literature in the European state system of the 19th and 20th centuries. Her first book, Between States: The Transylvanian Question and the European Idea during WWII (Stanford University Press, 2009), shows how the struggle for mastery among Europe’s Great Powers was affected by the perspectives of small states. Her second book, The Age of Questions: Or, A First Attempt at an Aggregate History of the Eastern, Social, Woman, American, Jewish, Polish, Bullion, Tuberculosis, and Many Other Questions over the Nineteenth Century, and Beyond (Princeton University Press, 2018) explores when and why people started thinking in terms of “questions,” and how it altered their sense of political possibility. She has written on European history, literature, politics and ideas for various magazines and newspapers, including The Guardian, The Chronicle Review, Aeon, The Nation, Dissent, The Times Literary Supplement, Eurozine, and Boston Review.
Jacob G. Foster is a professor of informatics and cognitive science at Indiana University, Bloomington, and an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He studies the social production of collective intelligence, the evolutionary dynamics of ideas, and the co-construction of culture and cognition. In his empirical work, he blends computational methods with qualitative insights from science studies to probe the strategies, dispositions, and social processes that shape the production and persistence of scientific and technological ideas. His theoretical work focuses on the principles behind natural and artificial intelligences and on the social science of the possible. He is co-director of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, a program that aims to build community, collaboration, and creative thinking among early career scholars interested in the study of mind, cognition, and intelligence of diverse forms and formats — from ants and apes to humans and AI. He earned his Ph.D. in statistical physics and complex systems from the University of Calgary, and he trained as a social scientist as a postdoctoral scholar and research assistant professor at the University of Chicago. From 2020-2021, he was an Infosys Member at the Institute for Advanced Study.
Tung-Hui Hu is an associate professor of English and digital studies at the University of Michigan. He is a media theorist and a poet and the author of five books, most recently Digital Lethargy (MIT Press, 2022), A Prehistory of the Cloud (MIT Press, 2015), and Greenhouses, Lighthouses (Copper Canyon Press, 2013).
Juliet Koss is the Gabrielle Jungels-Winkler Professor of the History of Architecture and Art at Scripps College. She has published widely on modern European art, architecture, and design, with an emphasis on Germany and the USSR. Her first book, Modernism After Wagner (University of Minnesota Press, 2010), was a finalist for the College Art Association’s Charles Rufus Morey Book Award. She is currently a visiting scholar at the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia at New York University, where she is completing “Model Soviets,” a book on model objects, scale, and temporality in 1920s and 1930s Moscow, for MIT Press.
Tara Suri is a Prize Fellow at Harvard University’s Center for History and Economics. She is a historian of science and society in colonial and postcolonial South Asia. Her work draws together histories of medicine, health, and the environment; histories of decolonization and the global Cold War; and histories of race, gender, caste, and sexuality. Her current book project traces the history of South Asia’s global biomedical trade in rhesus monkeys. In 2025, she will join Dartmouth College’s history department as an assistant professor.
Images from The New Landscape in Art and Science by Gyorgy Kepes, Paul Theobald and Co., 1956
