Author
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...
How did Nashville’s Youth (Re)Imagine the Future of Global Mall with Technology?
Sep. 6, 2024—Hannah Ziegler, 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 part of my ongoing work with the Teens (Re-)Storying the Creek with STEM (T-ReCS) project, I have been interested in exploring ways to capitalize on the pedagogical affordances of...
Life-Affirming Cycling Practices in Quito, Ecuador
Aug. 23, 2024—Julie Gamble, 2024-25 RPW Center Faculty Fellow. This year’s group is exploring the theme of Emerging Technologies in Human Context: Past, Present, and Future Daisi held her right arm in the air with a closed fist, a common signal for cyclists to use when coming to a stop. We stopped at her request and had...
Helping Nature Rebound: Enabling People to See The Invisible
Mar. 21, 2024—Andrew Kyung is a 2023-24 Humanities in the Real World Fellow. Human beings are impatient creatures. We seek immediate results when taking action, which may have benefited our ancestors millennia ago when harrowing problems necessitated a swift, gung-ho response. Our tendency to look for immediate and tangible results from drastic action persists today. In an...
Office of Postdoctoral Affairs Newsletter Features Helen Makhdoumian
Mar. 7, 2024—This post by Helen Makhdoumian (CHPP Fellow) is from the Office of Postdoctoral Affairs March 6, 2024 newsletter Walk by the Robert Penn Warren Humanities Center (RPW) on a sunny afternoon, and you’ll likely see a group of people eating at one of the tables outside and having a lively conversation. Odds are good it’ll...
Legal Career Boosted by Humanities Studies
Feb. 15, 2024—Matt Brolund is a 2023-24 Humanities in the Real World Fellow. This year’s undergraduate cohort are blogging their interviews with professionals who majored in the humanities. To Davis Shugrue, a lawyer trained in the humanities, debate is about far more than arguing for the sake of it. From his undergraduate studies to his current position...