As the Uncommon DH (Digital Humanities) Critic for the current academic year, Lauren M.E. Goodlad (Rutgers University) will be giving a public talk, “The Lifecycle of Writing Subjects: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Large Language Models,” on March 29. At Rutgers, Professor Goodlad is Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature as well as a faculty affiliate of the Center for Cultural Analysis (CCA), the Rutgers British Studies Center, and the Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science. Professor Goodlad works in many areas, including nineteenth-century studies (an area that will also be of interest to us), but comes to us at a particularly timely moment due to her work on artificial intelligence (AI). At Rutgers, Professor Goodlad is the chair of a new interdisciplinary initiative on Critical Artificial Intelligence and is Editor-in-Chief of Critical AI (https://criticalai.org/), an interdisciplinary journal. Through Critical AI, she is also leading the organization of Global Humanities Institute 2024: Design Justice AI, which will be held this summer at the University of Pretoria in South Africa.

Professor Goodlad will be the latest speaker in a series that has now brought to campus some of the leading critics in the field of DH, including Roopika Risam, Miriam Posner, Lauren Klein, Kim Gallon, and Natalie Houston.