The Public Humanities Hub (PHH) hosts (or co-hosts) a number of speakers each year who are actively engaged in public-facing research and community-engaged scholarship. PHH is particularly interested and open to co-sponsoring events with departments and units on campus with advanced humanities research.
2024/25 Public Humanities Noted Scholar Lecture Series
March 6th, 2025: PHH Noted Scholar Lecture: Dr. Alex Hanna and Dr. Beth Coleman, “The Politics of Freedom: Generative AI, Race as Technology, and Postcolonial Computing”.
Please join us for a PHH Noted Scholar Lecture by Dr. Alex Hanna and Dr. Beth Coleman, where they will be in conversation to discuss “The Politics of Freedom: Generative AI, Race as Technology, and Postcolonial Computing”.
Dr. Alex Hanna is Director of Research at the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR)* and has published widely in top-tier venues including the journals Mobilization, American Behavioral Scientist, and Big Data & Society, and top-tier computer science conferences such as CSCW, FAccT, and NeurIPS. Dr. Hanna is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Applied Transgender Studies, and sits on the advisory board for the Human Rights Data Analysis Group and the Scholars Council for the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry. *The Distributed AI Research Institute is a space for independent, community-rooted AI research, free from Big Tech’s pervasive influence.
Dr. Beth Coleman is Associate Professor “Data & Cities”, Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology, University of Toronto (U of T). Working in Science and Technology Studies, generative aesthetics, and Black poesis, her research focuses on smart technology & machine learning, urban data and civic engagement, and generative arts. Dr. Coleman is inaugural director of U of T’s Black Research Network. She was a 2021 Google Artists and Machines Intelligence awardee and is a Senior visiting researcher with Google Brain and Responsible AI.
Event offered by: Public Humanities Hub and Centre for Computational Social Science.
February 5th, 2025: PHH Noted Scholar Lecture: Dr. Antje Ziethen
Please join us for a PHH Noted Scholar Lecture by Dr. Antje Ziethen, Associate Professor of French, Department of French, Hispanic & Italian Studies (FHIS), where she will speak about her PHH Faculty Fellowship project, “Reverse Diaspora: The “Brazilians” in West Africa”. This lecture is also part of the FHIS Research Seminar.
Dr. Antje Ziethen specializes in African literatures and francophone literatures, with a particular focus on (urban) space, migration, and gender. She is the author of Géo/Graphies postcoloniales. La Poétique de l’espace dans le roman mauricien et sénégalais (WVT, 2013) and the co-editor of Beyond the Postmodern: Space and Place for the Early 21st Century (2015) and Afrika-Raum-Literatur/Africa-Space-Literature (2014). Dr. Ziethen has published special issues on science fiction in French, literary transnationalism, and spatial approaches to literature. Her most recent publications deal with the Black Mediterranean, speculative fiction, and geographic metafiction. Currently, she is working on her second manuscript which reads novels from across the African continent through the lens of transatlantic migration.
Event offered by: Public Humanities Hub and Department of French, Hispanic & Italian Studies.
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Upcoming Events
Stay tuned for upcoming PHH events in 2025.