Author
Third Culture Katrina – Combining Culture with Mental Health and Psychological Practices
Apr. 17, 2025—Katrina Rbeiz, 2024-25 RPW Center Graduate Student Fellow. This year’s group is exploring the theme of Emerging Technologies in Human Context: Past, Present, and Future. As a Lebanese American woman growing up in six Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) countries, I developed a fascination for how human behavior and mental health are impacted by...
The Surge of Surgical Robotics: Why Patient Education Matters More Than Ever
Apr. 17, 2025—Emily McCabe, 2024-25 RPW Center Graduate Student Fellow. This year’s group is exploring the theme of Emerging Technologies in Human Context: Past, Present, and Future. If you’ve ever wondered about the role of robots in surgery, you’re not alone. “Will you be in the room while the robot performs my surgery?” is an all-too-common question....
From Chatbots to Policy Makers: AI’s Role in Democratic Decision-Making
Apr. 17, 2025—Sung Jun Han, 2024-25 RPW Center Graduate Student Fellow. This year’s group is exploring the theme of Emerging Technologies in Human Context: Past, Present, and Future. Have you ever wondered how systems, from simple tools to complex technologies, make decisions? One of the most widely used frameworks to describe this process is the Input-Process-Output (IPO)...
Beyond Careerism: Finding Meaning in Undergraduate Education
Apr. 4, 2025—Jason Vadnos, 2024-25 Humanities in the Real World Fellow majoring in Human & Organizational Development and Culture, Advocacy, & Leadership with a minor in Business. This year’s fellows conducted interviews with Vanderbilt University alumni about the role humanities education has played in their careers. “I’m going to college to get a good job.” For millions...
A Novel About Storytelling and Technology
Mar. 19, 2025—Lydi Conklin, 2024-25 RPW Center Faculty Fellow. This year’s group is exploring the theme of Emerging Technologies in Human Context: Past, Present, and Future The novel I’ll be working on at the Robert Penn Warren Center this year is called “Cast of Cowards.” The book follows a group of teenagers attempting to write a devised...
An Environmental History of AI
Nov. 21, 2024—Laura Stark, 2024-25 RPW Center Faculty Fellow. This year’s group is exploring the theme of Emerging Technologies in Human Context: Past, Present, and Future AI has emerged as a massive technical and scientific innovation in the past thirty years, to the extent that historians now treat AI as a driving force of history—on the order...
Authors Talk Emerging Technologies
Oct. 17, 2024—Serenity Gerbman is the director of Literature & Language Programs at Humanities Tennessee. Fun fact: There were just 66 years between the Wright Brothers’ first powered, controlled flight in 1903 and Neil Armstrong walking on the moon in 1969. Humans are in a hurry. Recently, I heard someone on a podcast describe their experience of...
Why So Serious? How Mental Illness Became Laughable
Oct. 10, 2024—Sarah Hagaman, 2024-25 RPW Center Graduate Student Fellow. This year’s group is exploring the theme of Emerging Technologies in Human Context: Past, Present, and Future Can you laugh at jokes about mental illness—even a joke about suicide? Breakout standup comedian Taylor Tomlinson thinks so. Yet nervous audience laughter—the equivalent of a collective tee-hee or a...
Peru’s in Nashville because Nashville was in Peru
Oct. 4, 2024—Peter Sebastian Chesney, 2023-2026 Collaborative Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow Has anyone else noticed the ever so subtle hints of Peru peppering so many of Nashville’s most revered cultural institutions? This linkage caught my eye at the Nashville Zoo when I first noticed Expedition Peru: Trek of the Andean Bear. Besides several truly magnificent mammals endemic to...
Cognitive Biases in Large Language Models
Sep. 27, 2024—David Thorstad, 2024-25 RPW Center Faculty Fellow. This year’s group is exploring the theme of Emerging Technologies in Human Context: Past, Present, and Future It is often held that humans fall prey to a number of cognitive biases. For example, we may react differently to different framings of the same decision problem, or may anchor...