The Leslie Center Seminars on Humanities and Technologies

We are excited to announce The Leslie Center Seminars on Humanities and Technologies. The series invites humanities faculty at Dartmouth to engage together in open inquiry, exploration, and critique regarding the challenges and opportunities that contemporary technologies pose for our work.

The Seminars involve pre-reading, panel discussions, and active participation during the sessions. Open to all humanities faculty and postdocs. Registration is required. 

The schedule of events for Winter 2026 can be found below. Click on event titles for more information.

Text+Textiles+Technology: Threaded Ecologies (Feb. 16-20)

A workshop organized by postdoctoral fellow Hayri Dortdivanlioglu (Society of Fellows, Studio Art) that investigates the ecologies of text, textile, and technology through weaving as a mode of material inquiry into technology's agency in co-generating new ways of knowing across disciplines. Seminar events for humanities faculty will be held as part of the workshop.

Humanities Thinking About AI (Feb. 24, 12:15pm-2:00pm)

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?

D. Graham Burnett (Mar. 2)

A visit by D. Graham Burnett (Princeton University) that includes a seminar discussion for faculty on AI/Humanities/Attention, and a public book talk on Attensity!, a new book by The Friends of Attention.

Mar. 2, 12:00pm-2:00pm: Humanities/AI/Attention

Mar. 2, 3:30pm-4:30pm: Attensity! Book Talk

Humanities Teaching With/out AI (Mar. 5, 12:30pm-2:15pm)

What, if any, are productive uses of Al in higher education courses? This seminar convenes humanities faculty to discuss whether and how Al might contribute to pedagogy in our classrooms as a teaching and learning aid. We will hear from colleagues who have experimented with the affordances of AI in this context as well as from those who have not found it useful. We will discuss this in the context of theories of learning in the liberal arts.

Humanities Thinking With AI (Mar. 10, 12:15pm-2:00pm)

Al is often touted as a source of significant potential for work in STEM-related fields and research, but its role in humanities research is less frequently discussed. This seminar will focus on the potential for Al as a tool in specifically humanities-based research and practice.