IHGC Hosting International Conference on ‘Humanities Informatics’

UVA’s Institute of the Humanities and Global Cultures next month will host the annual conference of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes, a global professional body with more than 200 humanities centers from around the world. Scheduled to run June 13-17 in the Rotunda Dome Room, Nau Hall, and elsewhere on Central Grounds, this year’s CHCI conference will include panels on artificial intelligence, algorithmic cultures, the impact of big data, and the danger to democratic societies posed by Facebook and other social media.

The Consortium’s advisory board includes Arts & Sciences Dean Ian Baucom and IHGC Director Debjani Ganguly, and the Arts & Sciences faculty members scheduled to speak at the event include Matthew Burtner (Music), Jack Chen (East Asian Languages, Literatures and Cultures), Camilla Fojas (Media Studies), John Mason (History), Siva Vaidhyanathan (Media Studies), and Chad Wellmon (German).

Other leading scholars scheduled to appear this year include Lydia Liu (Columbia), Wendy Chun (Brown), Achille Mbembe (Witwatersrand), Jonathan Albright (Columbia) and James Evans (University of Chicago). The conference also will feature a workshop on “Experimental Humanities” to highlight the role of humanities labs – including IHGC’s Lab on “Humanities Informatics – in advancing research in the 21st century.

The final panel, scheduled for Saturday, June 16 in Nau Hall and titled “#Charlottesville: August 11 & 12,” will focus on the eruption of neo-fascist violence in contemporary America. The panel will revisit the legacies of slavery, the civil war, the history of Confederate monuments, and white supremacist movements in Virginia. Scheduled speakers for this panel include Louis Nelson, UVA’s Vice Provost for Academic Outreach and Professor of Architecture; Deborah McDowell, Director of the Carter Woodson Institute of African and African-American Studies; John Mason, Associate Professor in the Corcoran Department of History; and Michael Bérubé, the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Literature at Penn State University.

For more information on the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes and the conference, visit the CHCI website.