AI and the Humanities Lunch Forum: Embodiment
Join colleagues for food, a brief panel discussion, and informal conversation about how the humanities might approach AI as a technology, social phenomenon, and presence in higher education.
Attendance is limited to members of the Yale community and requires advance registration. A short optional reading will be pre-circulated to registrants one week before the event.
Registration opens January 6, 2026, at 5 pm.
PANELISTS:
Robin Dembroff is a professor of philosophy at Yale University whose research explores how stories of our bodies shape how we perceive ourselves and others. Their first book, Real Men on Top: How Patriarchy Shapes Our Reality (forthcoming with Oxford University Press in 2026), argues that our social world is structured by stories of sex, development, and lineage that regularly devalue women, children, animals, and the vast majority of men. Their writing appears in academic journals across five disciplines, as well as popular outlets including Scientific American, The Boston Review, TIME, The Guardian, and The New York Review of Books. In 2022, Britannica named them one of twenty “shapers of the future” under 40 in the category of academia and ideas.
Neta Alexander is a professor of Film and Media Studies at Yale University. Her work focuses on digital culture, film and media, science and technology studies, and critical disability studies. Her analysis of buffering revealed the understudied ways in which latency and delay are inherent to digital systems and infrastructures. Her first book, Failure, co-authored with Arjun Appadurai, reveals how Silicon Valley and Wall Street monetize failure and forgetfulness. Her second book, Interface Frictions: How Digital Debility Reshapes Our Bodies, explores four ubiquitous interface design features—refresh, playback speed, autoplay, and Night Shift—to develop a theory of digital debility. Taken together, these case studies demonstrate what can be gained from placing the non-average user at the center of media history.
Ben Glaser is Director of AI Initiatives in the Humanities at the Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning and Yale Library. He is developing university-wide strategies to explore Generative AI’s impact on and integration into teaching and research. He supports faculty with course design, policies and practices for ethical AI use, and deploying and assessing AI tools. Glaser is particularly interested in increasing both AI literacy and interpretability across Yale’s scholarly community.