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The

Humanities Center

AI Conference

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Humanities AI Conference

How do we ensure that the design, development, and uses of emerging technologies like AI, robotics, and genetic engineering prioritize and reflect human interests? The humanities and STEM fields in the academy increasingly operate in separate spheres, leaving little room for conversation and intellectual exchange. This lack of serious engagement across highly specialized fields of knowledge has extended beyond academia to hamper serious public discussion about the ethical and societal impact of emerging technologies.

As a first step toward remedying this situation here on the Lehigh campus, the Humanities Center will host an interdisciplinary workshop bringing together Lehigh faculty from the humanities, sciences, and engineering with leading scholars from around the country working on the intersections of the humanities and AI.

Dates: April 25-26, 2025
Location: Lewis Laboratory 270 or virtually via Zoom

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Schedule Overview

Friday, April 25, 2025

9:30 - 11:00 am: Workshop on Embedding and Machine Translation
Location: Lehigh Digital Media Lab, Fairchild-Martindale Library Room 421

  • Pre-conference workshop led by Marcus Bingenheimer (Temple University) and Justin Brody (Franklin and Marshall College)

11:15 am: Welcome from Humanities Center Director Shellen Wu
Location: Lewis Laboratory 270

11:30 am – 12:45 pm: Seeking the Human in AI

  • Fritz Breithaupt (Indiana University)
  • Zening Duan (University of Wisconsin)
  • Haiyan Jia (Lehigh University)

12:45 – 1:45 pm: Lunch break

2:00 – 3:45 pm: Texts and Contexts with Lehigh University Department of English chair Ed Whitley

  • Leonardo Flores (Appalachian State University)
  • Anna Preus and Melanie Walsh (University of Washington)
  • Greg Reihman (Lehigh University)
  • Laurent Dubreuil (Cornell University)

3:45 – 4:15 pm: Student Poster session and coffee break

4:15- 5:45 pm: Geographies of AI

  • Bo Zhao (University of Washington)
  • Ruth Mostern (Pittsburgh University)
  • Shellen Wu, (Lehigh University)
  • Emily Yeh (University of Colorado, Boulder)

5:45 – 6:45 pm: Breakout Discussion: What will the humanities disciplines look like in 10, 25, 50 years?

Saturday, April 26, 2025

9:00 – 10:30 am: Making AI work for the humanities

  • David Dunning (Smithsonian Institution)
  • Jeff Tharsen (University of Chicago)
  • Kwok-Leong Tang (Harvard University)
  • Junjie Luo (Gettysburg College)

10:30 – 11:00 am: Coffee Break

11:00 am – 12:00 pm: Creative AI?

  • Jeffrey Kirkwood (Binghamton University)
  • Jenny Kowalski (Lehigh University)
  • Amardeep Singh (Lehigh University)
  • Antigoni Papidimitriou (Lehigh University)
  • Willy Das (Lehigh University)

12:30 – 1:45 pm: Lunch break

2:00 – 3:30 pm: Dissenting Voices Hidden Contributions

  • Mar Hicks (University of Virginia)
  • Khurram Hussain (Lehigh University)
  • Annabella Pitkin (Lehigh University)
  • Justin Greenlee (Lehigh University)

3:30 – 4:00 pm: Coffee break

4:00 – 5:00 pm: TBD

5:00 – 6:30 pm: Breakout Discussion: Reflections on an Uncertain Future

Conference Attendees

Read the bios of all the Humanities AI participants.

Meet the Attendees