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FALL 2026 SEMESTER

A glance at the
humanities around campus

Welcome to a new academic year in the Humanities Center! I hope that everyone is doing well and that you had a restful, productive and pleasant summer. The humanities are thriving on the UR campus. In the year ahead the Center will present lectures, discussions, films, reading groups, and other events that not only explore what it means to be human across cultures and time but reinforce how the humanities are more relevant than ever. This first newsletter for 2026-27 offers a glimpse of upcoming events at the Center or co-sponsored by the Center, provides updates on current programs, and proposes ideas to propel our efforts moving forward.

The Odyssey

It’s been an Odyssey summer and our first event in the Humanities Center will weave together Homeric poetry and informal discussion of The Odyssey, Sept. 3, 6:30-8 p.m. Greek food will be provided! Can we agree that after this summer the value of the humanities can no longer be questioned, at least monetarily?The Odyssey has made to date nearly $1.3 billion, world-wide in theaters and seems bound to remain a cinematic juggernaut. Whether measured by the numerous, spirited scholarly debates, or by the raft of articles appearing in popular periodicals and online, the film has reminded everyone that a text stretching back three millennia can captivate modern audiences. Through reliance on human scholarly muses -- translation, literary interpretation, theatrical performance, historical research – The Odyssey illuminates for a broad public the hard toil of the dedicated scholars and artists who breath life into the arts.

Authority

The Humanities Center is leaning into this year’s annual theme, How is authority constructed? During this semester alone, visiting lecturers will consider authority from a variety of perspectives including those of a medieval queen striving to rule, not merely produce an heir, historical accuracy and myth-making in World War II war games, and the crafty suffragists who employed needlework in their struggle, just to mention a few.An upcoming presentation about the horse influenza of 1872-73 --  an interdisciplinary collaboration between the Humanities Center and the Psychology Department -- reveals the intersections of disease and civic governance. These talks and others will invite us to think about the very idea of authority in the past, present and future.

Translation

The Center will also offer events related to the translation initiative. Acclaimed translator Damion Searls joins us on October 6 from 12-1:15 p.m. for a discussion titled “Reading Like a Translator”. And speaking of translation, don’t forget The Odyssey!  (shout out to the Classics department for seizing the moment) The Classics Department have invited Joe Goodkin, a modern-day bard, to perform some of his retellings of Homer’s epics.  

The attention economy

The Center will continue to challenge us to confront pressing issues facing the humanities today. Topping the list is the question of what it means to be human in the age of AI? How do we ensure that human remains at the center of the Humanities in this rapidly changing environment? The Humanities Center is partnering with the Faculty Hub in a new Faculty/Staff Learning Community (FSLC) that focuses on teaching and learning in our era of the so-called ‘attention economy’, an age/time of epic distraction. The habits of mind fostered by humanistic study and its ability to offer context in a complex world are even more important in our era of fractured concentration. Can we treat the imminent challenge as an opportunity to clarify and expand the vision of the humanities not just in our classrooms or across campus but also outside the institution? The FSLC and other programming will encourage efforts to provide device-free spaces on campus where students can focus deeply on reading, reflection and person-to-person conversation.  

Humanities Fellows program

What about the Humanities Fellows? The Spring ’26 Fellows cohort has traveled the globe this summer as they work on their independent research projects. Their ports of call included Athens, Prague, Seoul, Beijing, Guizhoa, Chicago, Atlanta and Monticello, and the list goes on. They are producing essays, story maps, artworks, position papers, digital biographies, and even a philosophical treatise on AI through a Marxian lens! They will present their research at the undergraduate symposia this spring and next. In just a few months we will be selecting a new cohort of Fellows — help us spread the word!

Community

Undergirding all our efforts is the Center’s commitment to reminding the campus community that the human is at the center of the humanities. Plans are in the works to bring the humanities community together for monthly coffees and teas and something like the former “Poetry Thursdays” (maybe on another day). The Center will partner with the Career Development Center to hold workshops on career pathways in the humanities. A revised version of Humanities Connect (currently on hold), provisionally called Humanities Connections, is also in development. Don’t hesitate to contact me with your questions and suggestions. As we exchange ideas, share new research possibilities and sing the praises of a humanities education, we will continue to fulfill the Center’s vital mission: to promote the humanities “as a cluster of practices that shape how we perceive, make sense of and respond to an ever-changing world.”

All the best for a great year,

Dr. Joanna Drell

Humanities Center Director

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NEWSLETTER LEAD ESSAY

Last spring, you may remember that we published a Q&A lead essay in the newsletter featuring Dr. Lauren Tilton’s thoughts on the intersection of the humanities and AI. This month we’re doing much the same but from the perspective of our colleague in English, Dr. Kevin Pelletier. As you’ll read below, Kevin offers thoughtful, eloquent, and passionate responses to the questions, certainly in alignment with what he advocates for in higher education and the liberal arts.

We are grateful for this open, honest dialogue at this nexus point for the humanities.

Joanna Drell
Humanities Center Director

——————

An AI-Humanities Q&A
with Dr. Kevin Pelletier

Question: How do you respond to your UR colleagues who think AI is going to kill the Humanities?

Kevin Pelletier: I respond with compassion and empathy because my colleagues who express this view recognize that this is a precarious moment for the humanities. With the advent of AI, students can choose to circumvent with such ease the kinds of practices, habits, and values that humanists believe are indispensable to a liberal arts education: slow, careful, patient study; deep reading; deliberate and at times painstaking writing; sustained and open dialogue in the face of confusion, frustration, and disagreement. These practices, no doubt challenging at times, are foundational to the liberal arts and can be a source of profound, transformational pleasure for students. But they are also at risk, because AI promises to eliminate struggle, confusion, and frustration. With AI, everything is streamlined. Students don’t have to be patient; they don’t have to be deliberate. They might be efficient and productive. But they don’t have to be deep.

For those within higher education who believe that universities are made in the image of the market and who champion optimization, productivity, and efficiency as core educational values (“excellence” in the familiar shorthand), the matter is already resolved. AI is an unmitigated blessing. I wish I could be so optimistic, but there are still many questions about AI’s role in higher ed that our community hasn’t even begun to ask, let alone tried to answer. What happens if AI subverts the educational mandate of the liberal arts tradition? How is AI already reshaping the way students understand what it means to study as the principal activity they will undertake in college? Could AI lead otherwise well-meaning teachers to betray their vocational responsibility to students by permitting them to outsource to the machines the difficult tasks of thinking and learning? How can educational institutions that claim to care about environmental stewardship continue to normalize the use of instruments that exact an unconscionable environmental cost?

I suspect my colleagues throughout the humanities and creative arts have their own pressing questions as well. We should have been given a chance to share our concerns before the university embraced AI and unilaterally made these tools available to every member of this institution.  

Q: What excites you the most about AI?

KP: I don’t use AI at all because I don’t see how it would meaningfully enrich my intellectual and creative life. And it’s certainly not relevant to my private life. But that’s a personal preference. I understand what makes AI exciting for others even if it doesn’t excite me. In my capacity as a teacher, I spend considerable time trying to understand how the five wealthiest corporations in the world—the tech giants responsible for giving us AI—are going to help us realize our educational vision when they are, in fact, motivated by a ruthless business model hell-bent on capturing and monetizing the attention of every single human being who owns or has access to a phone or computer, and how my courses might intervene in and disrupt this dehumanizing economic strategy.

The human toll of the attention economy is visible everywhere. Our attention spans are shattered. We see this in our children, our students, and likely ourselves. Reading is way down and scrolling is way up in every age demographic. People are depressed and lonely in alarming numbers, despite the tech industry’s promise that social media would enable us to experience robust forms of human connection. The statistics about college students are especially upsetting. AI won’t ameliorate these problems; it will exacerbate them. As D. Graham Burnett, an eminent historian of science at Princeton University, succinctly puts it: “AI is the absolute nuclear option in the war for attention, and those bombs are already falling.” I think we should be cautious about entrusting even a fraction of our educational mission to these companies and their instruments, given how reckless we know them to be. If we want our students to be autonomous, if we want them to possess the capabilities, the confidence, and the courage to think for themselves, then they must engage in the kind of study that will enact this transformation. As every educator knows, there is no true understanding without study. There is no offloading or outsourcing of that responsibility. The machines can’t do it for us.  

Q: Should AI Literacy be part of General Education for UR students and why?

KP: How one answers this question depends on what one believes the purpose of a liberal arts education is, and my ideas about the curriculum emanate from my assumptions about why we undertake this work.

So what does it mean that the University of Richmond understands itself to be part of the liberal arts tradition?

By offering a liberal arts education, we make a promise to our students that we will shepherd them through a slow and at times painful process because it might revolutionize the way they understand the world and their place in it. We open up to them this university—its resources, its serene spaces, and most importantly, its remarkable people—to serve as a kind of sanctuary within which they can explore the richness of our shared cultural inheritance. We engage with our students in the collective study of this inheritance in the hopes that it reveals meanings and uncovers perspectives that can inspire and fortify. We insist, first and foremost, that education is a process, and a slow one at that. Students can expect to spend considerable time being confused and frustrated because their professors spend considerable time being confused and frustrated. These are the necessary preconditions for real learning to occur within the liberal arts, and they have been the same preconditions for over two thousand years. When we offer students ways to speed up this process, when we give them technologies that remove the process altogether or prevent them from experiencing the magic of having their own insights and making their own discoveries, when we furnish them with quick and easy answers that they did not come to through careful, diligent study, we break our promise to them and violate what is most sacred about the tradition we are all part of.

Q: A big concern among my humanities colleagues is how AI is affecting the teaching of writing.  What is your response to this concern?  Do you address the issue in your classes?

KP: Writing is hard. Teaching students how to write, and write well, is even harder. In the humanities, we believe that writing is not just a delivery system for ideas; in fact, it might be the single most important practice by which students can strengthen, expand, and sharpen their minds as they struggle to think through and express in written prose a complicated idea or insight. It is the best kind of intellectual training for students because there is much they must manage as they develop a piece of writing: framing their argument; making precise transitions from paragraph to paragraph; marshalling and analyzing the evidence; keeping a coherent structure over seven pages, or ten pages, or twenty and sometimes thirty pages or more. In my own classes, it was common for me to give writing instruction at the start of every class for the first ten weeks of the semester. My students and I would discuss the essential features of writing, which they would then try to incorporate into their own writing, and my feedback on their submitted essays was always as detailed as my instruction. I took their writing very seriously as the intellectual acts that I understood them to be.

Following the spring semester of 2024, I decided I could no longer teach writing or assign essays. New technologies like ChatGPT made it exceedingly difficult to persuade students to give themselves over to the process. I have colleagues who continue to assign and teach writing, and I genuinely admire their commitments. We are all trying to find ways to adapt. But if writing does end up being the first major casualty of the AI insurgency in higher education, this will be an ominous sign indeed.

Kevin Pelletier
Associate Professor of English