Speaker Series 2024-25
The UF Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere invites you to the 2024-2025 speaker series Page Unbound: Humanities in the Digital Age, a dynamic exploration of how digital technologies intersect with the humanities to shape our understanding of knowledge, identity, and ethics in the modern world.
This series brings together leading scholars to address the evolving relationship between technology and the humanities, offering fresh perspectives on the challenges and opportunities presented by digital tools, AI, and computational approaches.
SPEAKERS
Spring 2025
Marisa Parham, PhD, Professor of English and Digital Studies, University of Maryland at College Park
Title: “Black Living and Other Computational Poetics”
Date: Thursday, February 6
Time: 4 – 5:30
Location: Smathers 100
Marisa Parham is a Professor of English and Digital Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she directs the African American Digital and Experimental Humanities initiative (AADHUM) and NarraSpace, a storytelling lab centered on BIPOC experiences. She is also an associate director at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) and holds affiliate faculty appointments in African-American and Africana Studies, in the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, the program in Immersive Media and Design, and in the program in Comparative Literature. Her work explores texts and technologies that challenge ideas of time, space, and materiality, particularly in African American literature and culture. Notable projects include the digital-interactive essay .break .dance, and “Sample | Signal | Strobe: Haunting, Social Media, and Black Digitality.” Parham is currently developing a digital-interactive narrative on memory and technology, and ConvocationAR, an XR-driven project.
Lyneise Williams, PhD, Associate Professor of Art History, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
Title: “Technology, Rethinking, and Claiming our Time”.
Date: Wednesday, March 5
Time: 4 – 5:30
Location: Smathers 100
Lyneise Williams is an Associate Professor of Art History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (PhD, Yale 2004). She is the author of Latin Blackness in Parisian Visual Culture, 1852-1932 (2019), which explores how Parisian visual culture linked blackness to Latin American identity from the mid-19th to early 20th century through figures like Cuban entertainer Chocolat and Panamanian boxer Alfonso Teofilo Brown. Her current book examines beauty, fashion, and the Black male athletic body in 1920s-30s Paris, while a third project focuses on trauma, care, and African American spirituality in 1920s South Carolina. A former Getty Scholar Fellow, she has published on Uruguayan artist Pedro Figari, African art, and hip-hop jewelry. Williams also serves on the Chief Justice Advisory Commission on Portraits and has curated African art exhibitions, including contributing to the North Carolina Freedom Monument Project.
Alexander Gil Fuentes, PhD, Senior Lecturer II & Associate Research Faculty of Digital Humanities, Yale University
Title: “From Columbus to Google: Evolving Architectures of Knowledge”
Date: Thursday, March 27
Time: 4 – 5:30
Location: Smathers 100
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Description: Modern libraries and archives cannot be understood without steady reference to the history of European conquest and colonial expansion. In the 21st century, we are as likely to mourn its evident gaps and silences as to rejoice in its feats of accumulation. Scholars today train to read between the lines, against the grain, to mind the gaps, even to critically fabulate in order to be able to reconstruct the lived world and knowledges lost in the wake of European genocide and erasure. Not far from his father’s desire to see and own all, Ferdinand Columbus imagined and went out of his way to build a universal library of all that was known and could be known. We begin our analysis here, at the encounter, when cosmography and bibliography seem to collapse into each other, driven by the Euro-Christian will to conquer. We end in the present, when companies like Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, Clarivate and other specific actors have gained enormous power through their ability to aggregate, index and manipulate massive corpora; now, when the cultural and historical record of humanity has become a hybrid construct, part analog, part digital; but also when so- called generative AI begins to make its hallucinatory contributions to that very record. How do we even begin to understand the gargantuan history of the de facto historical record itself? How do we understand it as both product and producer of history? In this talk, I propose a few tentative approaches to help us make sense of this vast trajectory. Focusing on textuality, I conclude by advocating for increased attention to the infrastructures that prop the historical and cultural record today.
Alexander Gil Fuentes is a Senior Lecturer II and Associate Research Faculty of Digital Humanities in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Yale University, where he teaches introductory and advanced courses in digital humanities, and runs project-based learning and collective research initiatives. His research interests include Caribbean culture and history, digital humanities and technology design for different infrastructural and socio-economic environments, and the ownership and material extent of the cultural and scholarly record. He is currently senior editor of archipelagos journal, editor of internationalization of Digital Humanities Quarterly, co-organizer of The Caribbean Digital annual conference, and co-principal investigator of the Caribbean Digital Scholarship Collective, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon foundation.