Anglophone Studies in the Age of Generative AI: Scholarship, Criticism, Teaching
When?
18 March – 19 March 2026
Where?
FRIAS seminar room, Alberstr. 19, 79104 Freiburg
Contact for registration:
E-Mail: FRIAS Events Team
Organisation
About the Workshop
The rapid growth of so-called generative artificial intelligence (genAI) in interfaces such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Midjourney, and Seedance 2.0 raises fundamental questions for Anglophone studies, its methods, its objects of study, and its didactics. The aim of this workshop is to take stock of recent developments in genAI as they pertain to scholarship, criticism, and teaching, and to foster a dialogue on what these developments mean for Anglophone studies.
The workshop assembles a group of students, early career researchers, and established scholars to discuss these and related questions: How does the technology and political economy of AI affect the production and reception of literature and culture now that texts, images, films, apps, and games can be generated? How can literary and cultural texts help us make sense of these new forms of genAI in light of its longue durée? How are the roles of authors, readers, and scholars changing in this new media ecology? How can we foster critical dialogue between teachers and students at university? Should we be “thinking with AI” or stand “against AI”?
Programme
| Wednesday, March 18 | |
| 15:00 – 16:30 | Discussion panel A: Criticism Wolfgang Funk (Mainz), Samuel Butler’s “Darwin Among the Machines” Sarah Wegener (Mainz), Poems from I am Code Regina Schober and Öznur Özdal (Düsseldorf), Excerpts from Etter’s Ripe and Stein’s If You’re Seeing This |
| 16:30 – 17:00 | Coffee break |
| 17:00 – 18:00 | CANCELLED Hannes Bajohr (Berkeley), “Surface Reading LLMs: Synthetic Text and Its Styles” (hybrid via Zoom) |
| Thursday, March 19 | |
| 9:00 – 10:00 | Rebecca Roach (Birmingham), From Programming Literature to Talking Machines |
| 10:00 – 10:30 | Coffee Break |
| 10:30 – 12:00 | Discussion panel B: Scholarship Victoria Craggs (Freiburg), Excerpt from “The AI Question, or What if Homer Had ChatGPT?” Alexander Scherr (Gießen), excerpt from Nowotny’s In AI We Trust Eckart Voigts (Braunschweig), “Artificial Intelligence as Recombinant Appropriation” |
| 12:00 – 13:00 | Lunch Break (Catered vegan lunch for presenters) |
| 13:00 – 14:30 | Discussion panel C: Teaching Leandra Haßmann (LMU München), “An A for AI? Assessing Student Work in the Age of Generative AI” Irmtraud Huber (Konstanz), “Guidelines for the Use of AI in Teaching and Study (Konstanz)” Felix Sprang (Siegen), “Voice, LLMs, and Academic Writing Style” |
| 14:30 – 15:00 | Conclusion and outlook Gero Guttzeit (FRIAS/LMU), Excerpt from “Provocations from the Humanities for Generative AI Research” |
Impressions
