Investigating the Impact of AI Across Fields of Study

The Collaborative Humanities Lab “Models-Scale-Context: AI and the Humanities,” led by Holly Case (History) and Suresh Venkatasubramanian (Computer Science, Data Science), completed a second year of intensive collaborative activity. Symposia and workshops assembled experts in and beyond academia to discuss AI and its ramifications in politics, business, knowledge production, decision-making, and religion. Author Meghan O’Gieblyn, who had spoken previously at the institute about the meteoric rise of AI, returned for a lecture about the ways in which AI threatens attention and the critical importance of attention to human agency.

Holly Case led the graduate seminar “From Big Data to Lilliputians: Considerations of Scale Across the Disciplines,” and a new round of reading groups proposed by faculty and students across campus explored topics such as automation, the use of AI in literacy education, and generative AI in the arts. Courses and reading groups have proved to be a meaningful method of encouraging scholars with different levels of familiarity with AI to join focused conversations about AI.

Thinking Critically About Ethnic Studies and Its Future

Humanities Initiative Scholar, and incoming Cogut Institute Director, Shelley Lee (American Studies, History) launched “Origins and Afterlives of Ethnic Studies,” a project exploring Ethnic Studies as a grassroots academic movement that emerged in response to pressing social and political needs and has subsequently shaped thinking in and outside the academy.

The initiative’s inaugural event brought scholar and filmmaker Celine Parreñas Shimizu (Theater, Film, and Television | University of California, Los Angeles) to campus for a talk exploring Asian American representations in the media, challenges to academic freedom, and the importance of free expression in general.

As part of the initiative, Lee has launched a podcast, “The Confluence: Ethnic Studies and the Public Good” with cohost Gina Pérez (Comparative American Studies | Oberlin College). Lee and Pérez explore the meaning of Ethnic Studies in a democratic society, engaging guests about their work as educators, museum curators, and public intellectuals.

The Fellows Seminar

The Fellows Seminar gathers scholars at all levels across disciplines in the humanities and the humanistic social sciences to pursue individual research projects and share their work-in-progress in a workshop setting. Scholars learn from the distinctive methods, modes of thought, and vocabularies of other disciplines; gain insight into the particularities of their own disciplines; and develop invaluable ways of communicating their work to a broad audience.

This year's fellows explored projects on topics such as provincial identity in the Roman Empire, the philosophy of AI, the politics of Holocaust memory, and the aspirations of universal humanism.

Watch short videos of all the fellows introducing their work

Engaging Students Across Campus in Shared Inquiry

A total of 37 courses, most of them new, brought recent and ongoing humanities research to the classroom.

In the collaborative humanities, Nadje Al-Ali (Anthropology, Middle East Studies) and Lingzhen Wang (East Asian Studies) designed a new undergraduate course on “Transnational Feminist Knowledge Production and Practices: Perspectives from East and West Asia.” The graduate seminars spanned the fields of archeology, comparative literature, history of art, and modern culture and media, among others.

Digital Humanities Librarian Tarika Sankar, concurrently appointed as a lecturer in humanities, launched “Decolonizing Data: Approaches from Caribbean Digital Humanities and Beyond,” and Linford Fisher (History), as interim faculty director of the Library’s Center for Digital Scholarship, taught the annually evolving “Introduction to Digital Humanities.” Postdoctoral research associates Cherod Johnson and Eda Tarak enriched Brown’s environmental humanities portfolio with four new courses.

The course “Race and Its Avatars: Literary Identity Politics from the Medieval to the Present,” led by Daniel Kim (English, American Studies) and Mariah Min (English) produced a conference featuring their graduate students and a keynote by scholar Leerom Medovoi (Religious Studies | University of Arizona). The course and conference explored pre-modern forms of collective hatred and fear that emerged prior to the stabilization of race as an identity marker.

2025–26 Course Catalog

Greg and Julie Flynn Cogut Institute Speaker Series

The institute’s flagship series brings to campus high-profile speakers who have been nominated by faculty and undergraduates at Brown. Pulitzer Prize–winning author Jhumpa Lahiri discussed writing across languages; political theorist and civic leader Danielle Allen (Government, Education | Harvard University) spoke about collaboration for positive change; and celebrated environmental historian Sunil Amrith (History | Yale University) explored violence as a driving factor in our planetary crisis.

These speakers also held seminars for small groups of undergraduates with diverse interests. The attendees of Lahiri’s undergraduate seminar, for example, came from 14 different concentrations, including Applied Mathematics, Biology, International and Public Affairs, and Neuroscience.

Humanities research is essential to understanding the historical record, our cultural archives, ongoing and emergent trends, and the multiplicity of ways in which we relate to each other as people. It provides the foundation for envisioning and plotting a course to a positive future. At a time when misinformation and disconnection are on the rise throughout society, support of the humanities is deeply needed.

You can help Brown University continue to develop cutting-edge new research and world-class leaders by supporting the Cogut Institute. Your gift to the Cogut Institute will be an investment in resources and opportunities that attract talented new faculty to campus, enable students to realize their potential, and help scholars at all levels to shape critical conversations in the world today.

We have space-naming opportunities in Andrews House that will help us to expand our programming and teaching. A gift in support of the following priorities will also contribute to growing the humanities faculty, extending financial support to scholars, and enriching the student experience:

• Humanities Initiative Professorships
• Interdisciplinary centers and initiatives
• Graduate student training and professionalization
• Our essential Director’s Innovation Fund

To learn more about how your gift will make an impact, please contact Shelley Roth P’17, P’20, Director of Development for Academic Initiatives, at shelley_roth@brown.edu or (401) 863-6592.