Conveners:

• Molly Geidel, Associate Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
• Mark A. Thornton, Assistant Professor, Psychological and Brain Sciences 
• S. Freeman, Postdoctoral Fellow, Geography

From its pioneering deal with Anthropic to its boosting of the Evergreen therapy chatbot, Dartmouth has embraced an AI-guided future. Over the past year, the College has held numerous events about the benefits of teaching and conducting research with AI, while holding almost none that reflect the more critical perspectives on AI coming out of many fields. Rather than dismissing these critiques as stubborn resistance to an inevitable future, this University Seminar attempts to understand them, engaging with the many scholarly fields that chronicle both the history of what is now called AI and the harm it is causing human and nonhuman life. Reading works from geography, psychology, environmental studies, business history, sociology, science and technology studies, philosophy, critical race theory, digital humanities, surveillance studies, tech journalism, Native American and indigenous studies, literary and film studies, gender and sexuality studies, and other fields, this group will pose and attempt to answer three main questions: first, what is AI made of? Second, what is intelligence? And finally, what does AI do in the world? Each term we will combine reading group meetings with visiting speakers to attempt to answer one of these questions.

Conveners:    

• Bryce L. Ferguson, Assistant Professor of Engineering
• Brian K. Plancher, Assistant Professor of Computer Science

Artificial intelligence has enabled many systems to operate autonomously and is rapidly becoming ubiquitous, influencing everything from global supply chains to scientific discovery. At the same time, a gap has emerged. While these methods are widely used, the ability to design, analyze, and adapt the underlying algorithms, optimization frameworks, and decision-making structures remains concentrated among a small group of researchers. When these tools are treated as a black box, their potential for domain-specific innovation is limited, and their risks are harder to assess. The Dartmouth Autonomy Seminars aim to address this gap by bringing together researchers across departments, including Engineering, Computer Science, Math, Economics, and Psychological and Brain Sciences, with a focus on understanding the system-level principles that enable autonomy. By examining the shared mathematical and algorithmic structure across approaches, the series moves beyond high-level applications and supports the development and refinement of methods tailored to specific problem settings.

The seminar series emphasizes translating foundational techniques across disciplines that often develop them independently. It explores how common structures such as optimization, planning, inference, and learning appear in different contexts and how they can be organized into broader frameworks for autonomous systems. These technical discussions, led by academic and industry researchers, are paired with perspectives on how autonomous decision-making interacts with established models of behavior and system design. For example, learning-based methods and economics intersect when autonomous agents influence markets and incentives. Engineering and cognitive science connect when comparing algorithmic approaches to perception, memory, and navigation. The series also addresses practical challenges, including interpretability, reliability, and responsible deployment, ensuring that advances in autonomous systems remain grounded in both technical rigor and broader context.

Conveners: 

• Devin Singh, Assoc. Professor of Religion
• Andrea Tarnowski, Assoc. Professor of French and Comparative Literature

This seminar explores debt and credit as frameworks shaping economic and institutional life, moral reasoning, and social relations. Often understood as financial instruments, debt and credit also operate as powerful metaphors and organizing principles across domains ranging from religion and law to education, medicine, and environmental policy. Society uses the language of debt and credit to assign obligation, value, and responsibility.

Seminar meetings twice per term will offer a rotation of formats: discussion of a pre-circulated article, engagement with a colleague’s work-in-progress paper, or dialogue on a presentation by an invited speaker. Key to our work will be the recognition that financial, ethical, and political claims intersect when we speak of debts to society, reputational capital, and social contracts. A common conceptual vocabulary can link otherwise disparate fields of inquiry, illuminating paths through the social sciences, humanities, and sciences in both A&S and the professional schools.

Conveners:

• Laura Ogden, Professor of Anthropology
• Martina Broner, Assistant Professor of Spanish and Portuguese
• Matteo Gilebbi, Senior Lecturer in Italian Studies

This interdisciplinary seminar seeks to broaden cross-campus dialogue about how changing environments affect both human and nonhuman realities. Drawing on scholarship in the environmental humanities, it will engage the concept of "more-than-human" to examine entanglements among humans, animals, plants, and other biophysical entities — challenging Eurocentric nature/culture binaries and decentering the human in ethics and theory. The seminar aims to extend these conversations beyond the environmental humanities to include scholars working on the consequences of environmental change for both nonhuman ecologies and the human communities whose lives are deeply shaped by these shifts, with the shared goal of thinking collaboratively and creatively about resilience and alternative futures.

The seminar will be organized around five keyword-driven sessions, beginning with "entanglement" as a conceptual anchor for exploring the ecological, semiotic, and material relations that bind, fray, or transform worlds amid climate change. Subsequent keywords — such as "extinction," "extraction," "erasure," and "biodiversity" — will be developed collaboratively with participants, and each session will be based on a curated reading, film, or artwork to be engaged with prior to our discussion.

Conveners:
• Sarah Crockett, Assistant Professor, Emergency Physician, Geisel, DHMC, APD
• Heidi Denzel, Senior Lecturer, Visiting Associate Professor, German Studies, A&S
• Belinda Chiu, Lecturer, Tuck Bridge, Planning & Strategy Team, Mindful Dartmouth

The PPPD convenes experts, students, community partners, Indigenous knowledge holders and more-than-human partners to build a shared understanding of how climate change intersects with human behavior, policy, economic decision-making, health, wellbeing, and culture. As a venue for interdisciplinary collaborations and learning opportunities, our University Seminar seeks to advance climate knowledge by reconnecting research, leadership, and wellbeing through a community- and place-based approach.

Considering the dynamic relationship with our natural and social environment, the Seminar envisions to support faculty and students to integrate practices of embodied learning, informed by Indigenous, local, and global knowledge to connect climate literacy, wellbeing, and dialogue. Emphasizing that personal health is inextricably linked to healthy societies and a healthy planet, PPPD offers a platform for the co-creation of innovative solutions across disciplines and expands the field of knowledge and existence for people and planetary wellbeing.