Over the last two years, Professors Florence Hsia and Devin Kennedy have played key roles in an interdisciplinary effort to rethink how artificial intelligence is studied on campus. Working as part of a team led by Associate Dean Grant Nelsestuen, Hsia and Kennedy helped lay the intellectual and institutional groundwork for what is now the Center for Humanistic Inquiry into AI and Uncertainty. Their work culminated this fall in a major success: a competitive three-year, $500,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, with up to an additional $220,000 in matching funds, to launch the new research center.
The center brings humanities scholars into urgent conversations about AI’s ethical, historical, and social consequences. Professor Kennedy serves on the center’s steering committee, contributing historical perspectives on how societies have grappled with transformative technologies in the past, while Professor Hsia sits on the advisory board, helping guide the center’s broader vision and integration within the university’s research ecosystem. Their contributions investigate the importance of humanistic inquiry in shaping the future of AI.
Professor Kennedy is an Assistant Professor of History and the Evelyn and Herbert Howe Bascom Professor of Integrated Liberal Studies whose research examines the history of digital technology and computing alongside the development of U.S. capitalism, with particular attention to financial markets, management science, and labor. Professor Hsia is the David Hall and Margie Devereaux Professor of History of Physical Sciences, Associate Vice Chancellor for Research in Arts & Humanities, and Associate Dean for Graduate Education, whose scholarship as a historian of science explores the global circulation of knowledge, data, and information practices, with particular emphasis on astronomy and early modern science.
To read more about Professors Kennedy and Hsia’s work in the Center for Humanistic Inquiry into AI and Uncertainty, you can visit the College of Letters and Sciences.