Join us for "Humanities Thinking About AI," part of the Leslie Seminars on Humanities and Technology. This seminar explores current humanities-based inquiry into AI: What different technologies share the label 'AI'? How does the history of its development and financing affect what AI does and for whom it's useful? What questions and methods are humanities scholars currently applying in their analyses of AI? What particular challenges do we face as humanities scholars thinking about AI?
Registration is required and space is limited. Please register by emailing humanities.center@dartmouth.edu to reserve your space and receive pre-reading materials. Lunch is provided.
Tuesday, February 24, 2026
12:15pm-2:00pm
Class of 1930 Room (Rockefeller 106)
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Jacqueline Wernimont is Distinguished Chair of Digital Humanities and Social Engagement and an Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at Dartmouth College, where she runs the Digital Justice Lab. She specializes in mathematic and computational media and their histories, using humanistic and creative methods in her histories and analyses.
Her books include Numbered Lives: Life and Death in Quantum Media and the co-edited Bodies of Information: Intersectional Feminism and Digital Humanities (with Elizabeth Losh). Her current projects include creative considerations of the energy consumption of data centers and 21st century streaming, cloud computing, and data storage, as well as a book on the machines and systems of mortality in the United States.
She and Elizabeth Losh are the series co-editors for MIT Press' Media Origins series, which focuses on histories of our media through sociocultural lenses, including the practices and politics of digital labor.
Joy Lisi Rankin is an award-winning historian and writer. Most recently, Rankin was an Associate Professor at New York University in the Department of Technology, Culture, and Society. At NYU she directed research on Gender, Race, and Power in Artificial Intelligence at AI Now before she was appointed Senior Research Scientist at NYU's Center for Responsible AI. Prior to her tenure at NYU, Rankin held a joint appointment in two undergraduate honors colleges at Michigan State University as Assistant Professor, where she taught popular courses addressing science, technology, and society. Rankin earned her PhD in History from Yale in 2015 and was an invited Exchange Scholar at MIT during her doctoral work. Rankin's research and writing won multiple highly competitive awards and fellowships, including a prestigious postdoctoral appointment at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her first book, A People's History of Computing in the United States (Harvard University Press, 2018) was named one of the "Greatest Tech Books of All Time" by The Verge. Rankin's shortform writing has received Editor's Choice distinction from Lady Science and has been featured in Science News, Stat, Slate, Spike, Smithsonian's "What It Means to Be American" series, and The New Inquiry, among other popular and academic publications (and can be found on her website, www.joyrankin.com). Joy is a proud Dartmouth alum and is delighted to be returning to Hanover.