History of Artificial Intelligence

The course will trace the origins and trajectory of ideas about artificial intelligence, starting with the “active intellect” of Aristotle, early analog computers and automata, Ada Lovelace’s “calculus of the nervous system,” through the “general intellect” and “machine capital” of Karl Marx, Karel Čapek’s “Universal Robots,” the “Turing test,” “cyberpositivity” and Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto,” and concepts like “swarm intelligence,” “singularity,” and the “black box” problem. Sources will encompass a range of disciplinary approaches (philosophy, sociology, computer science, etc.), formats (text, film, graphic novel), and genres including Japanese anime and Afrofuturism.

HIST 1825J | Instructors: Holly Case and Suresh Venkatasubramanian

Archive Theory: Imagining Absence Otherwise

What does it mean to work through archival silences? What archival methods are necessary to mine the gaps? Facilitated by two cultural studies scholars, one located in American Studies and the other in Hispanic studies, this collaborative humanities seminar tackles the archive as an institution, a practice, and a methodology through the tools of queer studies, critical race theory, gender theory, media studies, and postcolonial studies. We will study archive theory through methodological discussions and hands-on practice with Brown’s special collections at John Hay Library. We will engage the work of key scholars in the field of archival studies, such as Saidiya Hartman, Anjali Arondekar, Marisa J. Fuentes, and Zeb Tortorici. Assignments will consist of short and long essays, responses to archival materials, group presentations, and the organization of a one-day public symposium.

HMAN 2401X | Instructors: Kiana Murphy and Alejandra Rosenberg Navarro

Faces: From Masks to Deepfake

What is a face? Faces are generally considered unique to the being they belong to — usually a human being, since animals tend to be denied access to faciality. Indeed, face, understood as singularity, is for Emmanuel Levinas what grounds the ethical relation to the other. But faces, as deepfakes have shown, are also utterly replicable: they can be grafted, mimicked, appropriated, forged. Our collaborative humanities seminar will delve into the representations of faces (portraits, self-portraits, selfies, close-ups), the classification of faces (Johann Kaspar Lavater’s physiognomy, the iconography of hysteria, Cesare Lombroso’s Criminal Man), the staging of faces (pornography), the racial politics of faces (Blackface, facial recognition, Frantz Fanon’s notion of mask), and the philosophy of “faceity” (Gilles Deleuze, Jean-Luc Nancy, Giorgio Agamben).

HMAN 2401Y | Instructors: Peter Szendy and Laura Odello

Decolonial Futurities: Submerged Perspectives from and within the Americas

Anthropocenic exhaustion begs for new/old artistic modes of gathering and collectivity. How can we think, do, create, perform, listen, sense, perceive, and generate future-oriented imaginaries based on the texture of ancient ways? This collaborative humanities course centers perspectives, translations, and mediations from and about the Américas. We seek to decenter the liberal humanism of environmental thinking to present modes of being that emerge from the otherwise of the Américas. This imaginary is pluralistic in its linguistic, racial, ethnic, and gendered imagination. It foregrounds submerged perspectives and unearths subterranean stories that confront legacies of (neo)colonialism, racial capitalism, and extractivist exploitation. Guest participants — with the support of the Brown Arts and Cogut Institutes, Modern Culture and Media, and Portuguese and Brazilian Studies — enliven our study across the U.S., Turtle Island, and Abya Yala (the Indigenous nomenclature for the Américas).

MCM 2510O | Instructors: Macarena Gómez-Barris and Leila Lehnen

Empire: Global Perspectives

Empires — ancient, early modern, and contemporary — have profoundly shaped the distribution of wealth and power in the modern world. However, imperial formations are strikingly diverse, and many of the entities that scholars now call “empires” were not understood as such during their own times. This collaborative humanities graduate seminar explores that diversity and examines how empires rise, fall, and perdure. While taking a global, comparative perspective, we also attend to local processes, analyzing how landscapes, objects, and people were bound up with imperial trajectories in such contexts as the ancient Mediterranean, Persia, China, the Andes, the Early Modern Atlantic, and the contemporary world. We afford particular attention to local peoples’ relationships with empires, environmental history, political economy, historiography, and imperial art and material culture.

HMAN 2402B | Instructors: Candace Rice and Parker VanValkenburgh

Reading the Large Language Models: Artificial Intelligence, Language, and Literary Art

Recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have produced systems that can appear human-level in their ability to generate text and images. This technology opens questions concerning the relationships between the art and philosophy of language and computation as cultural infrastructure. This seminar will explore how technology and humans interact via language, and what it means for humans and for AI to read and to write. The format of this collaborative humanities seminar will emphasize in-class discussion. Readings will comprise a mix of literature, including digital literature, theory, and philosophy of language. Participants will not be required to have a background in computer science or technology, but will experience tutorials on key technical concepts in order to enable them to think critically about cutting-edge developments in AI beyond a superficial level.

HMAN 2402C | Instructors: John Cayley and Ellie Pavlick

Postcolonial Theory

In this introduction to postcolonial theory we will consider key Western sources (Hegel, Marx, Lacan, Levi Strauss, Emmanuel Levinas); anticolonial manifestos (Gandhi, Fanon, Césaire, Memmi); political and ethical practices (civil disobedience, armed struggle, friendship). In addition to canonical critics (Said, Bhabha, Spivak), the course will review new interests in the field (transnationalism, non-western imperialisms, the environmental turn). Offered as a collaborative humanities seminar in Spring 2025, Postcolonial Theory will host and think with a series of guest scholars.

ENGL 2900X | Instructors: Leela Gandhi with guest scholars

Technologies of Memory

From archives to monuments, photographs to films, sound recordings to selfies to Twitter feeds, modern life has reached a saturation point of object-driven memory. This course examines modes of capturing memory in the 20th and 21st centuries, and asks what replaces the medieval memory palace as an imaginary habitat for recollection. Enrollment limited to 15.

ENGL 2901R | Instructors: Stuart Burrows and Ravit Reichman

Metals, Mining, and Jewelry: Making the World Anew

In this seminar we describe and analyze how the colonial order mined the world, focusing mainly on North Africa and South America. Metals are conveyors of powers, and are seated in pre-colonial mythologies, cosmologies, and ways of being in the world. In this collaborative theory/praxis course we ask with others (Walter Rodney, Eduardo Galeano, or Guamán Poma) how these can be reclaimed through the exercise of the gestures and techniques of below-the-ground materials. What would it mean practically to overturn the histories of plunder, theft, and evacuation and imagine beyond them? A central aspect of the course is to make and visit jewelry as immanent to social and spiritual fabrics. We acknowledge the presences and excesses of the materials we work with and engage these objects beyond the colonial and monocultural imagination.

HMAN 2402D | Instructors: Ariella Aïsha Azoulay and Macarena Gómez-Barris

Project Development Workshop

In this capstone course, students completing the Doctoral Certificate in Collaborative Humanities pursue individual or collaborative projects, such as a dissertation chapter, an article on method/theory, or a stand-alone essay related to the larger field. The workshop provides a collaborative and supportive space in which students from different disciplines can share their work and receive and give feedback that will broaden and sharpen the framing of their projects. At the end of the semester, participants present in a Collaborative Public Workshop. Admission to the seminar requires a formal application process and the completion of two HMAN 2400 seminars.

HMAN 2500 | Instructors: Amanda Anderson and Tamara Chin