ASPI Faculty Fellowship(s) in the Arts and Humanities

Owned by Lynnell Cabezas
Last updated: Oct 30, 2024 by Kim Bliss
5 min read

Technology continues to have an enormous impact on the modern world, affecting how we live, work, communicate, learn, engage in the political process, and live. The relationship between technology and culture is an integral part of our environment, our social interactions, our government, cultural and educational institutions, the arts, and nearly all other aspects of life.

The study of arts and humanities brings to the study of technology a vital critical and interdisciplinary lens that has animated and complicated existing scholarly and creative uses of technology. The Autonomous Systems Policy Institute (ASPI) at Syracuse University seeks to create an avenue for greater trans-disciplinary collaboration between the arts and humanities and the study of technology. As a result, each year ASPI will support a faculty fellow in the arts and humanities.

We invite applicants from all fields in the arts and humanities including but not limited to, philosophy, religion, literature, art, art history, music, music history, film, Indigenous studies, Black studies, environmental studies, women’s and gender studies. This fellowship is primarily focused on providing the space and opportunity for faculty members in the humanities whose research intersects with the study of technology to develop their work, a potential syllabus, and curate a conversation that focuses on their fields of study.

In addition to a course buyout for a semester, the faculty fellow will be expected to:

  • Participate in ASPI events and activities.

  • Design a course that will be cross listed with ASPI.

  • Host a conversation with a scholar on a topic of their choosing that examines the intersection of technology and the humanities.

  • Become a member of the review committee to evaluate fellowship applications for the following year.

Interested faculty can submit their application packet, which includes a curriculum vitae and a 1–2-page description of their research, by email to lncabeza@syr.edu by May 15th of each year.

ASPI 2025 Faculty Fellow(s) in the Arts and Humanities

G Douglas Barrett, assistant professor of TV, Radio, and Film in the Newhouse School, has been named the 2024-2025 Autonomous Systems Policy Institute (ASPI) Fellow in the Arts and Humanities. The fellowship provides space for faculty members working at the intersections between technology and the humanities to advance their research, design a new course, and curate a discussion related to their field of study.

Barrett’s research focuses on experimental music and related art movements since the Second World War, recently culminating in his 2023 monograph, Experimenting the Human: Art, Music, and the Contemporary Posthuman (University of Chicago Press). Through a unique meeting of historical musicology, media theory, and art history, the book argues that experimental music speaks to postwar science and technology’s decentering of human agency amid the uneven temporality of global capitalism. Barrett will develop a new course highlighting this project’s pertinence to current debates around artificial intelligence.

Relatedly, Barrett plans to facilitate a public conversation between world-renowned scholars on the meaning of being human in an age of autonomous systems. In another project, Barrett will co-edit a volume with the socio-legal scholar Saskia Vermeylen on art and property in outer space. Finally, Barrett intends to foster interdisciplinary collaborations between ASPI and “Posthumanities: Arts and Sciences,” a focus group he co-leads with Prof. Boryana Rossa (VPA) in the BioInspired Institute based on dialogue between art, science, and the humanities.

Chris Hanson, associate professor of Film and Screen Studies in the Department of English in the College of Arts and Sciences. He studies games, films, and media, with a focus on their relationships to the cultural, social, historical, and technological contexts in which they operate.

Hanson’s research will concentrate on the connections between games, technology, and artificial intelligence (AI). Within ASPI’s seminar course, he will examine both analog (e.g. board and card) and digital (e.g. video) games and consider their historical and cultural trajectories as shaped by technological and cultural practices. Through the close analysis of illustrative examples, the seminar will explore the earliest surviving clay game boards to the effects of industrialization and mass production on analog games and study the advances in electronics and computing that facilitated the creation of digital games.

The class will investigate the critical role that digital games have played in the development of AI, including the practices of designing and training AI models to play games, the utilization of AI within games including the differing behaviors or “personalities” of the AI routines controlling semi-autonomous enemy characters, the growing roles of generative AI systems in the development and production of games, as well as AI’s resultant implications for the game industry and its workforce.

The seminar course will concurrently examine the ways in which AI has been depicted and represented within games, films, and other media texts to assess and interrogate cultural anxieties about its potentials.  Hanson will curate and convene a discussion with invited speakers on the shifting roles of AI in games, and AI’s emergent impact on game development and other creative and cultural industries. He will continue work on a book project exploring early digital game and computing history and seek to build and foster interdisciplinary and collaborative games research on and beyond SU’s campus.

ASPI 2023-2024 Inaugural Faculty Fellow in the Arts and Humanities

Delali Kumavie, assistant professor of English in the College of Arts and Sciences, has been named the inaugural Autonomous Systems Policy Institute (ASPI) Fellow in the Arts and Humanities. The fellowship is primarily focused on providing the space and opportunity for faculty members in the humanities whose research intersects with the study of technology to develop their work, a potential syllabus and curate a conversation that focuses on their fields of study.

Kumavie studies the intersection of blackness, aviation and global transit by examining literary and cultural texts by Black writers and artists. She will further explore these intersections during her time as a faculty fellow by designing a course on myth and technology. This course will consider the ways in which technology draws on and is enfolded by conceptual codes that were developed in literary and cultural texts. Reading together critical theoretical conceptualizations of myth such as those by Roland Barthes, Northrop Frye, Hortense Spillers and Wole Soyinke with various ancient and contemporary mythologies, fiction and poetry the class will examine how a conceptual code of technology is accrued from literary texts.

In addition, Kumavie will curate a conversation on the topic of race and technology with invited speakers on blackness and technology. She will undertake preliminary work on two key collaborative projects, including one with Melissa Yuen at SU Art Museum to develop a future exhibition on race, myth and technology.