Modernist Studies Association Conference 2025: A Few Notes and Highlights

I was recently at the Modernist Studies Association conference in Boston.

MSA 2025 felt busy and lively, with many panels I wanted to see and workshops I wished I could have joined. My own main presentation at the conference was a talk on Wallace Thurman, Richard Bruce Nugent, and the making of Fire!!; I posted the slides publicly here. I also did a short position paper related to African American literature beyond Harlem for a workshop organized by Adam McKible; most of my claims came out of my datasets at African American Poetry: a Digital Anthology, which can be found here.

Below, I'll just give brief accounts of some things I saw and enjoyed, without saying too much about the actual findings of the research by the scholars who gave the talks. I won't try to cover everything I saw, in part because it would lead to a post that would be really, really long. I'm also trying to be sensitive to the research as presented -- much of which is not yet published. (So instead of saying what speaker X said, I'll say, they were looking at this text.)

Remembering Sejal Sutaria:

To start, the emotional heart of the conference for me was the panel "Writing in Community: Thinking Alongside Sejal Sutaria in Memoriam." As some readers may know, the scholar Sejal Sutaria recently passed away, and three of her close friends in academia (Ria Bannerjee, Casey Andrews, and J. Ashley Foster) organized a panel to commemorate her and discuss aspects of her published and unpublished work. I won't say too much about the specific papers given by the speakers, because I don't have direct permission to do so. I will say, however, that I was really moved by the way they blended personal reminiscences and tributes with academic engagement. Though we weren't close, I had known Sejal for many years (our first email correspondence was back in 2006, though I believe we first met in person at MSA around 2010 or 2011. We were on a panel together at the Woolf conference in 2019, and were scheduled to be on a panel together for last year's MSA, though she ultimately had to drop out for health reasons.). Sejal was a lovely person and a thoughtful scholar; she will be missed. You can find one of her published scholarly articles on Venu Chitale here; she covers some of the same ground in this essay at the BBC website. 

Also, Daniel Morse was in the audience, and he mentioned that Sejal had given a talk at his invitation at the University of Nevada-Reno four years ago, again on Venu Chitale's BBC work during World War II. The YouTube link for the talk is here.

Conventional academic panels -- a few links and highlights

The Baroness:

Eliza Browning, a Ph.D. student at Princeton, had a thought-provoking presentation on the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, an extremely idiosyncratic modernist figure sometimes overlooked by scholars as a Dadaist provocateur and not much else. A migrant from Germany to the U.S., she published quite a lot in The Little Review up through 1925, at which point the editors of that storied little magazine started rejecting her writings. Subsequently, her poems were often edited by her romantic partner Djuna Barnes, who held onto her manuscripts throughout the remainder of her own long life, trying but failing to find a publisher who would print them. Scholars today have the benefit of finally having the Baroness' writings collected in print, in a volume called Body Sweats: The Uncensored Writings of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven.

Natalie Barney: a "social modernist"

I also saw Sophie Yates, a Ph.D. student at UBC in Vancouver speaking about Natalie Barney, a rich American woman who lived as an expatriate in France for most of her adult life, and self-published a number of books of poetry and prose that circulated amongst a fairly small coterie. She was well-known to many other expatriates in France, including Sylvia Beach (who did not think highly of Barney's writing), and she was well known for taking many female lovers, including a British poet (who wrote in French!) named Renee Vivien. I won't say too much about Yates' readings of Barney, except to say that the works sound interesting, especially in connection with a close account of Barney's personal life.  

Anticolonial Manifestos:

I also went to a panel on "The Manifesto and Anticolonial Thought." Here I was most interested in new work from Peter Kalliney, on three mid-century transnational conferences for Black writers, the 1956 Congress of Black Writers and Artists (in Paris), the 1958 Afro-Asian Writers Conference that was held in Tashkent, Uzbekistan in 1958, and the African Writers Conference that was held at Makerere University College in Kampala, Uganda, in June 1962. Kalliney was interested in the manifesto-like resolutions produced at each of these events. He cited James Baldwin's first-hand account of the third event, published in an essay called "Princes and Powers." 

On the same panel, Alys Moody spoke about Aime Cesaire's often-overlooked poem, "Pour un greviste assassine" (For an assassinated striker), which you can find excerpted on JSTOR here. The poem is different from other Cesaire poetry I've read, in part because it's so direct and not especially 'surreal'. 

Also on the same panel, Maru Pabon of Brown University spoke about the Francophone Algerian poet Jean Senac, who worked closely with militants against French colonialism, but who was assassinated, possibly by Islamist militants, in 1973. Senac seems like a fascinating and important figure; I was particularly intrigued by Senac's "Ode to Afro-America" (1972). 

Queer and Trans Topics:

I saw part of a nice paper by Kristin Mahoney of Michigan State University on the fraught relationship

between the theosophist Jiddu Krishnamurti and his mentor (really: groomer) Charles Leadbeater. Krishnamurti was brought into the Theosophical Society by Leadbeater, and declared the "world teacher," but later rebelled against it. 

Chris Coffman of the University of Alaska-Fairbanks gave a paper on "Nonbinary Gender and Desire" in H.D. and Byrher. They were looking at H.D.'s "I Said" and Bryher's early collection of poetry, "Arrow Music." I found the readings of nonbinary or genderfluid frameworks of desire particularly compelling around this collection of poetry by Bryher. Bryher's 1922 collection isn't available online at all at present! Earlier, according to the U-Penn online books page, it was available at the Emory Women Writers Resource Project; now that points to a page on the Wayback Machine. One poem from the collection, "The Pool," can be found here.

At the same panel, I saw Mat Fournier of Ithaca College presenting on a fascinating trans-masc. figure named Violette Morris. Morris was a famous athlete in the 1910s who began to dress in male clothes and later had a mastectomy. She/They also got into car racing and later collaborated with the Fascist Vichy Regime. Fournier was interested in the question of whether and how Morris' strong desire to pass might have led them to embrace the most conservative mold of masculinity available at the time, which in turn led to a sympathy for fascist politics. 

Queer and Trans Marianne Moore

I also attended a panel on "Queer and Trans Modernist Poetics," which two speakers, Celine Shanosky
of Harvard and Benjamin Kahan of Louisiana State University, both speaking about trans and asexual tendencies in Marianne Moore's poetry. Kahan, of course, has a chapter on Moore in his book Celibacies, and Shanosky, a graduate student was citing that in her paper. Kahan here was perhaps slightly revising (or expanding) his earlier work on Moore, with a focus on Moore's own penchant for identifying with masculine figures in fiction as well as her famous public outfit (the tricolor hat and cape). Kahan here was focusing mostly on Moore's most autobiographical final book, Tell Me Tell Me: Granite, Steel, and Other Topics (1966).  

Little Magazines in Kolkata:

I also went to a South Asian Modernism panel (one of a handful at the conference), with speakers all focused on the College Street Neighborhood in Kolkata (Calcutta). This is an area just across from several major colleges established during the colonial period, including Hindu College, Presidency College, and the University of Calcutta. Since the early 20th century, it's been a place where you can find bookseller stalls lining the street, and coffeehouses where students congregate. A graduate student at Stanford, Suchismito Khatua, spoke about the Kolkata Little Magazine Library and Research Centre, founded by Sandip Dutta in 1978.  Dutta runs this center out of his family's house on Tamer Lane (just off College Street. He had the idea for it when he saw the librarians at the National Library throwing out a bag of old little magazines in the mid-1970s. Thus, an archive was born. 

It seems like a really cool place, though the pictures Suchismito shared of stacks upon stacks of magazines not arranged in any appreciable order struck me as both exciting and exhausting. What's in those stacks? Who in their right mind would catalog all of it? 

Keynote: Evie Shockley and Kevin Quashie talking about Gwendolyn Brooks, Lucile Clifton, Auden... 

I was only able to get to one keynote event, with Evie Shockley and Kevin Quashie talking about poetry in a structured conversation (not a conventional 'talk'). They talked about Gwendolyn Broooks' "Boy Breaking Glass," Lucille Clifton's "Study the Masters," Auden's "Musee des Beaux Arts," as well as several poems by Shockley herself that seem to be in dialogue with some of these earlier poems. 

Throughout, they were interested in how these poets deal with questions of minoritization, the legacy of race and racism, and the social function of poetry. 

Along the way, they mentioned Shockley's concept of the Son-not -- a poem that looks like a sonnet, perhaps, but subtly isn't one. There's a bit more about that here.

See my notes from MSA 2024 here.

Slides for MSA 2025: Wallace Thurman and Bruce Nugent

Two Conferences: Toni Morrison (Cornell) and Frances E.W. Harper (Penn State)

I attended two conferences this past weekend, the Toni Morrison conference at Cornell, celebrating 70 years of Morrison's graduating with her M.A. from the institution, and the Frances E.W.  Harper conference at Penn State, celebrating the 200th birthday of the great Pennsylvania-based writer-activist. 

1. From the Morrison conference, a highlight for me was giving a talk on Toni Morrison (based on my recent article) in the new Toni Morrison Hall on North Campus. I was an undergraduate student at Cornell 1992-1995 and it felt a little surreal to be back. Much is different (the beautiful design of Klarman Hall, grafted onto Goldwin Smith; the new Toni Morrison and Ruth Bader Ginsburg halls), but quite a number of the core buildings on campus are still the same. The A.D. White House, for instance... Collegetown Bagels... 

From the conference itself, a few highlights include: 

• The screening of a documentary about Morrison's month-long residency at the Louvre in Paris in 2006, "The Foreigner's Home"
• Farah Jasmine Griffin's powerful and graceful keynote address (which got a standing ovation from the audience!). Since seeing the keynote I've been reading more of Griffin's work; I'm three chapters into her 2021 book Read Until You Understand; highly recommend. 
• Autumn Womack's keynote about the construction of the Toni Morrison "Sites of Memory" exhibit at Princeton (spring 2023). I saw this exhibit in person when it was up, and enjoyed the chance to learn more about how it was put together.  
• Kevin Young's poetry reading Friday evening. I mostly knew Kevin Young as an editor before this conference; now I'm eager to pick up his books of poetry and explore them. 
• I had a spirited exchange with a French scholar who was interested in aligning Morrison's Playing in the Dark with Derrida's later writings on race. It seemed like she wanted to align Derrida and Morrison in a way that seemed a little confused; I tried to challenge her to also note the real divergences between them.  In my mind, it seems important to think about why we want to link certain authors to concepts in French theory. I do do some of this in my own work, but I try and do it very carefully and for the right reasons. Does X theory concept help us understand Toni Morrison? If not, why are we invested in using it / invoking it? 
• My own paper was pretty well received. It was an extract from my recent published article on Morrison. 
• Seeing a number of my former professors from the 1990s around, including some who are retired, but at least one who is not. I also enjoyed meeting legendary people I had not met when I was at Cornell as a student, such as Dr. Margaret Washington. We talked about the impact of the tradition of student protest at Cornell, including the 1968 takeover of Willard Straight Hall by the Black Student Union and the 1995 takeover of Day Hall by Latino students.  I also got the chance to meet Carol Boyce Davies, who had been at Cornell for many years, but who now teaches at Howard University. 

2. The Harper conference at Penn State was beautifully organized and implemented by a pretty impressive group of faculty and staff.  After giving my paper at Cornell Saturday morning, I drove down to State College for this second event. 

I missed some of the opening panels (since I was at Cornell). But here the highlight for me was definitely the dinner honoring Frances Smith Foster, a pioneering scholar who helped put Frances Harper on the map. I got a chance the next day to chat with Dr. Foster directly for awhile and she was wonderful -- sharp as ever, and very generous and wise.

This conference was a little challenging for me in part because it's in a period (pre-1900 American literature) that is outside my traditional areas of competence. (I got interested in Harper through my Digital Anthology project.)  But the enthusiasm and commitment to Harper was very palpable and contagious. There are very few authors who inspire this type of deep moral and intellectual commitment (Toni Morrison, interestingly enough, is another such writer). If I do another Harper event, I'll certainly want to spend some time deepening my knowledge and filling in some of the gaps in what I've read. 

One of the exciting new developments in Harper studies was Eric Gardner's recent discovery of a previously unknown speech by Harper, "National Salvation."  I'm also very much looking forward to his upcoming book on Harper from Oxford.

It's possible that the paper I wrote for the conference might be published in a collection in the near future (we'll see). My own paper, looking at the pessimistic strain in Harper's poetry, was somewhat controversial, though I enjoyed the challenge of writing it and participating in the discussion.  

Overall, this second conference was both inspiring and humbling. 

New Project: Adivasi Writers: An Introduction to India's Indigenous Literature

This summer, I've been working with a graduate student collaborator, Srishti Raj, on a new digital project, called Adivasi Writers: An Introduction to India's Indigenous Literature. 

Here's the project summary: 

This site aims to be an educational resource for Adivasi writing, helping to share South Asia's indigenous literature with the broader world. For those who are unfamiliar, Adivasis are South Asian indigenous communities, subject to a long history of marginalization and displacement going back to the colonial era and continuing in the present. There are more than 100 million Adivasi people in India alone, located throughout the country, with particular concentrations in central India as well as in the northeast region. For generations, Adivasis were written about rather than subjects of their own story. This site aims to help change that by centering Adivasi voices directly in a decolonial framework, and making their writings accessible to a broad readership.

I got interested in this project in part through engaging with decolonial theory focused primarily on Latin America and indigenous literatures of the Americas. Shouldn't we be talking about these ideas in South Asia as well? Unfortunately, despite many years of teaching and writing about Anglophone South Asian literature, my own knowledge on the topic of indigenous communities in South Asia was limited to people writing about Adivasis, not writing by people from those communities themselves. And my hunch was that this would likely be true for most of my peers as well: not many papers on Adivasi literature are given at conferences like the South Asian Literature Association (SALA) conference, and I don't see too many in U.S.-based journals either. (Journals published in India, like the Sahitya Akademi's Indian Literature, do a little better.) 

Overall, this seemed like another gap in the archive -- perhaps something that could be addressed if one were willing to do some digging!

As I first conceived of this project in 2023, my basic knowledge of those Adivasi communities was itself pretty thin. I knew about Santhals and the Ho community from reading Mahashweta Devi's work, but little about the others (and there are hundreds of officially recognized Scheduled Tribes in India, with a population of more than 100 million people!). An early experiment entailed looking for maps of Adivasi communities. I wrote about my results with that research in 2023 here. 

In short, our summer research process followed three stages. 

1. First, we quickly learned we had to be looking beyond English-language materials. By default, this summer, we have been looking at a fair amount of materials in Hindi. 
2. We did discover a number of helpful resources online to help us with our research. 
3. We have been experimentally trying to translate some key materials we've been encountering, often using generative AI translation engines. 

Mira Nair, Mahmood Mamdani, and "Mississippi Masala" (book chapter excerpt)

In honor of Zohran Mamdani's victory in the NYC mayoral primary, I'm posting the following chapter excerpt is from my 2018 book on Mira Nair, called The Films of Mira Nair: Diaspora Verite, In the chapter, I track the parallels between Nair's Mississippi Masala (1993) and Mahmood Mamdani's memoir of the Ugandan expulsion, From Citizen to Refugee (1972).

The parallels between Mamdani's real-life experiences and the fictional account in the film, I argue, are pretty strong, and a look at the Mamdani text helps unpack the complexity of the Indian community's presence in Uganda that are shown in highly compressed form in the film. In the second half of the excerpt below, I discuss how Nair explores the complexity of race relations in the U.S., especially with newer immigrants complicating the white/Black binary of the American race formation.

Slides for The Space Between Conference: "African American Poetry of World War I"

 I'm giving a talk at The Space Between conference at KU in Lawrence, Kansas this week. The talk is built around a section of "African American Poetry: A Digital Anthology" that I've found to be of particular interest -- African American Poetry of World War I. 

Slides for ALA Conference 2025: The Boston Branch of the Harlem Renaissance

I'm giving a talk at this year's American Literature Association Conference in Boston, for a panel celebrating "100 Years of the Harlem Renaissance." I'll be talking about the Saturday Evening Quill, a magazine published in -- appropriately! -- Boston, from 1928-1930. 

Teaching Notes: "The God of Small Things" General Overview and Context

Briefly Introducing Arundhati Roy and The God of Small Things

Arundhati Roy is one of the most successful Indian writers in English of all time. Her first novel, The God of Small Things, was a bestseller around the English-speaking world upon its release in 1997, leading Roy to win the prestigious Booker Prize in 1998.

However, Roy took a long break from writing fiction after The God of Small Things, and became known as an activist and political essayist, who frequently wrote to criticize undemocratic policies of the Indian government as well as the American prosecution of the “War on Terror” after 9/11. She’s also well-known for her interventions on behalf of environmental justice (especially for Indian indigenous communities, known as adivasis or "tribals") as well as her advocacy for Dalits and other low-caste communities. Many of these themes are visible in one way or another in The God of Small Things; the issue of caste is obvious; there is also an important environmental justice theme if you read carefully. 

Roy finally published her second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, in 2017. It’s a fascinating book in many ways, with a transgender protagonist (pretty unusual in Indian fiction) and a plot involving the Indian government’s response to the Kashmiri secessionist movement. It’s closely attentive to important events in recent Indian politics. If you like The God of Small Things, you might enjoy that newer novel as well, though on the whole the newer book is a little messier and less well-structured than this one (some reviewers complained that Roy needed a stronger editor…).  

With her playful use of language, Roy is often compared to writers from an earlier period in Indian writing, especially Salman Rushdie. Writers like Rushdie delight in wordplay and puns, especially puns or jokes that come from Indian languages; Rushdie also employed a “magic realist” method – certain supernatural plot events are built into his novels, alongside conventional, realist narratives involving realistic human characters. Roy doesn’t have ‘magic’ in that way, but there is nevertheless a sense in her fiction that everyday life is supersaturated with meaning and significance. 

Syllabus: Digital Humanities Grad Course, Spring 2025

I taught a DH class with twelve graduate students this spring. It was my first time teaching DH since fall 2020, and a lot has changed in the field since then. My own approach has become much more hands-on, with a lot less by way of "what is DH?" theorizing. I also added new units on mapping and Storymaps/ArcGIS, a crash course introducing Python, and a couple of sessions to discuss the implications of generative AI. 

It may be a bit tedious to navigate, but I opted to include the 'long-form' syllabus below the jump, with lots of links to individual projects and articles alongside descriptions of some of the hands-on exercises we did in this course.    

Syllabus 

English 498: Introduction to Digital Humanities 

Spring 2025

Professor: Amardeep Singh (“Deep”)

Email: amsp@lehigh.edu 

Brief Description: 

This course introduces students to the emerging field of digital humanities scholarship with an emphasis on social justice-oriented projects and practices. The course will begin with a pair of foundational units that aim to define digital humanities as a field, and also to frame what’s at stake. How might the advent of digital humanities methods impact how we read and interpret literary texts? How is technology reshaping the role of the Humanities in our cultural conversations more broadly? We’ll also explore a series of thematic clusters, including “Race and the Digital Humanities,” “Postcolonial/Decolonial DH,” “Archives, Editions, and Collections,” and “Texts as Data.” Along the way, we’ll explore specific Digital Humanities projects that exemplify those areas, and play and learn with digital tools and do some basic coding using Python. The final weeks of the course will be devoted to collaborative, student-driven projects. No prior programming or web development experience is necessary, but a willingness to experiment and ‘break things’ is essential to the learning process envisioned in this course.

The final project may be a conventional analytical paper or a digital project – either a custom-built corpus (with brief explanatory essay), a custom-built mapping project (perhaps using ArcGIS), or a Scalar collection, or something else that you would like to produce. If you do a digital project, I would strongly recommend consulting with me early and scoping out the resources you might need to make it a reality. The work should be “equivalent” to the amount of time you might spend on a 15 page paper. 

Humanities AI in 2025: Brief Reflections After a Conference

I’ll try and keep these reflections brief. There were maybe three threads I was following at the recent Humanities AI conference at Lehigh:

1) Critical AI

Slide from Greg Reihman

2) Academic Power Users. ("Generative AI is pretty useful for scholarship; here’s what I’m doing with it.")

3) Critically-engaged Best Practices. ("Yes, let's be critical of commercial generative AI, but insofar as scholars are going to use it in academic work, here are some best practices.")

Often it seems like group #1 and group #2 are engaged in non-intersecting conversations. People invested in critical AI have been hardening their position against the "plagiarism machine" in recent months, especially as we've seen it operating in the destructive DOGE cuts to the federal government. It is important to engage with those critiques -- though it might also be good to pay attention to the ways generative AI has been changing, and also alternative approaches to engaging with it. 

I'm not sure it actually happened at the conference, but if we bring the observations of critics together with the experience and knowledge base of regular practitioners, we might get to #3.

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1) “Critical AI” is a phrase (and now a journal) associated with different lines of thought highlighting the many problems with the overhyped generative AI industry, with a long list of valid complaints, focusing on a broad array of topics:

• Its domination by big tech companies jockeying for position and market position
• Its status as business marketing ploy (“AI-powered coffee machine!” → No one needs this.)
• The implicit biases contained within AI training data, and the crude fixes we’ve seen for those biases (see Meredith Broussard, Joy Buolamwini, Lauren Goodlad, etc.)
• Its potential to be used for broad social surveillance and algorithmically-assisted policy harms, often sloppily deployed (i.e., DOGE cuts)
• The problem of not knowing what exactly is in that training data (including copyrighted texts). (Bigger issue: lack of transparency of closed platforms.)
• The concern that our experience of it as a “magic black box” continues to lead people to react to it as both a miraculous thing (harbinger of “AGI”) and as catastrophic (AGI doomerism).
• The magic black box is also of course a huge problem for teachers dealing with students who abuse the technology: it’s too easy to get answers and ‘good enough’ paper drafts. Generative AI as a way to avoid cognitive labor & the real and valuable struggle of trying to write.
• Environmental costs – exorbitant water and power demands, often invisible to the average user
• Its tendency to hallucinate – to create bad and made-up data, invent sources that don’t exist, and engage in faulty reasoning. (Gen AI as a linguistic statistical modeling machine…)
• The danger of it intensifying the epidemic of social isolation, loneliness, and epistemic insularity that has already been underway since the advent of the smartphone. People are increasingly turning to generative AI for companionship and therapy. Some of those uses could be benign (maybe a few trial runs with an AI therapist could lead humans to realize they might benefit from seeking out a real, human therapist). But the companionship use-cases have a lot of depressing possible outcomes, including a growing risk of personal dependency on the machine.  One hears anecdotally about young people turning to AI in lieu of human romantic partners, or marriages breaking up, etc.

My favorite moment along the lines of Critical AI conversation at the conference came from my colleague, Greg Reihman, who said, “What if, instead of calling the technology we are talking about ‘Generative AI,’ we had called it “Computational Text Generation Devices?”

My initial thought to that rhetorical question was, “if we called it that, probably none of us would be here in this room...” Which is to say, if it weren’t generally referred to as “AI” -- with all the science fiction baggage and mythos associated with that term -- probably the topic would be of interest to a narrow slice of computational linguists and natural language processing people in Computer Science. We wouldn’t have a room full of academics in fields like Religion, Philosophy, History, Asian Studies, Art & Design, and English all talking about it. Our collective investment in this topic is a result of marketing, of hype, of mainstream awareness.

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2) AI Power Users. 

Alongside several papers expressing some version of the above points, there were papers from people who use generative AI on a regular basis to do their academic research.

This conference had a substantial representation of Asian Studies scholars; some of those scholars were using it for translation and historical research: recent gen AI models have apparently made significant advances on translating from Chinese. Others were using it to query and engage in highly specialized topical research. I won't say too much about specific research, though you can get a sense of how that was talked about from the titles and backgrounds of the presenters on the program.

My friends and collaborators Anna Preus and Melanie Walsh have been using it to classify poetry, with some interesting results. See their published article on this here. 

There was also a paper on “Vibe Coding” that walked through how people, both in the industry and academia, are using gen AI to bypass traditional software development and coding. This can work on a limited scale, but it comes with a lot of problems, especially if you’re building software that might need to be updated, maintained, or used by lots of people. 

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3) Best Practices & A Couple of Useful Tools

Could we synthesize the critiques from group #1 with the observations made by people in group #2? If we are going to use generative AI for scholarly research, there might be a set of best practices we might want to employ.

A) Open Access. There seems to be a consensus that we should turn to open-access models instead of commercial generative AI like ChatGPT. For academic research, look for models with specialized / tailored training data (like the "Historical Perspectives Language Model", which could be used to study how language and usage have changed over time). 

One big reason for this is that we don’t want to be subject to the whims and vagaries of whatever Sam Altman is Tweeting about today. We also don't want to be 'locked in' as consumers willing to pay whatever price OpenAI wants to charge ($200 a month???). This might address the big business / tech billionaire complaint to some extent. (Not entirely: Llama is an open-access model, but it is of course created by Meta with the long-term goal of helping the company make money.)

Another possible value of open models is that we can know much more about what's in those models and how they work.  This might address the lack of transparency complaint. 

But another good reason to do this is actually about our own costs – open access models running offline are, as I understand it, free so we could feel empowered to try queries that might otherwise use too many ‘tokens’.  

B) Generative AI is constantly changing. It would probably be best if we stopped making very generalized claims along the lines of “AI simply can’t do that.” 

One feature of many papers I saw is an acute awareness that the platforms are constantly evolving and changing. The weird outputs of generative AI images from DALL-E a couple of years ago are mostly gone, as my colleague Jenny Kowalski talked about in her presentation. In their place are pretty generic, very average and acceptable images.

Some platforms still have trouble doing text with images, but others now do that very well (the latest ChatGPT).

Also, generative AI platforms also couldn’t do math very well a couple of years ago. Now they are much better at it (still not perfect). 

Overall, the commercial platforms are very aware that their long-term usefulness to a large swath of users – along with their commercial viability – will be greater if they can do a variety of tasks reasonably well, some of which might involve text generation, while others will involve reasoning and data analysis. So, especially since DeepSeek emerged a few months ago, they appear to have been making investments in building up those things rather than simply getting larger and larger datasets.

One task for scholars in the short term might be to try and keep track of what generative AI platforms are doing and how they’re changing. (Ideally, it would be great if the platforms themselves would document all the changes they’re making with each version in plain English. But if they’re not doing that, maybe we should be doing it.)

C) There are tools that can help us look inside training data used by models.

One is called “What’s in My Big Data?” This looks inside the pre-training data of DOLMA, an open-access AI model created by AllenAI. You can query specific pieces: is this particular novel in the training data? Instead of speculating or relying on the libgen catalog, WIMBD allows you to get under the hood of the generative AI models (and we can assume that what’s in DOLMA is probably at least somewhat similar to what might be in other models)

Unfortunately, WIMBD in its current form will be shutting down soon due to the costs of running it.

Another cool tool people were talking about is OLLAMA. OLLAMA allows you to run various gen AI models on the command line on your own machine. You can also configure them to develop answers to queries based specifically on libraries you might have on your own hard drive.

This way, your use of GenAI remains “offline” – the companies aren’t taking your data, and you can explore queries that might be closely related to your main research area. 

Needless to say, if you're running one of these models locally, you don't have to pay for a subscription -- it's free. 

If we approach generative AI in these ways, we might be able to avoid some of the worst pitfalls of the commercial generative AI industry. We might also hopefully stop seeing it as a magic black box and start seeing it as a research tool to facilitate certain limited tasks, not to replace human expertise, but to supplement it.

Slides for Humanities AI Conference: AI and the Future of Creative Writing

I gave a talk at the Humanities AI conference at Lehigh on Saturday April 25.

The talk was based on experiences and observations from my Spring 2024 class taught to advanced undergraduates. There is a description of that class here.

Slides on Claude McKay: Digital Collections and Diasporic Itineraries (Presentation at Lehigh)

Giving a presentation at Lehigh on March 27, surveying some recent digital projects and introducing the idea of Claude McKay as a diasporic writer. Here are my slides:

Slides for SALA Conference 2025: "Adivasi" as Catachresis

 

MLA 2025: What I Saw

As everyone reading this has surely heard, the big drama at the MLA this year was the Executive Council's decision not to allow the Delegate Assembly to vote on a BDS resolution (see this long explanation from the MLA regarding why they made this decision). That led at least some people I know to decide not to attend; others attended and participated in various actions, including a hallway 'pop-up' poetry reading on Friday, and protests before and during the delegate assembly meeting on Saturday. 

It might also be worth mentioning that there were no less than 28 panels related to Palestinian literature and culture at MLA this year, from Postcolonial / Decolonial literature panels, to Palestine and the Medical Humanities, to representations of Palestine in Medieval Literature. 

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Dana A. Williams, Jericho Brown, and Jesmyn Ward

My own MLA this year was mostly focused on Digital Humanities panels and African American literature panels -- that's mostly where my head has been for the past couple of years -- though I did attend a few other things, including an interesting Queer studies/theory panel with Judith Butler, a panel on "Palestine and Postcolonial Literature," and a panel revisiting the category of the "New Woman," with interesting papers on Pandita Ramabai and Alice Dunbar-Nelson.

I also presented myself on a panel on Friday afternoon connected to the “Responsible Datasets in Context” grant project I was on; if you’re interested in learning more about that, please visit our project website.

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In African American literature, this is a special centenary – it’s the 100th anniversary of Alain Locke’s groundbreaking anthology The New Negro: An Interpretation, which has often been cited as the starting point for the Harlem Renaissance. There were at least three panels that I saw relating to that event; I went to at least some of all three.

The non-AI DH panels I went to were a little quieter than I would have expected -- for years it seemed like DH was the "next big thing," and panels would be standing-room only. Last year, it seemed like the Next Big Thing was going to be "Critical AI" (standing-room only; lots of buzz). This year, the tenor of the AI panels was much more critical and skeptical. There certainly were a lot of them though -- the Online Program lists no less than 155 panels tagged as "AI."  

I missed the actual panel, but I heard from friends that the most interesting and useful conversations about AI they heard were at the panel with Katherine Elkins, Meredith Martin, Seth Perlow, and Aarthi Vadde that showcased the October 2024 special issue of PMLA on AI. So one place to start if you want to catch up on the AI talk at MLA might be that special issue. 

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As I mentioned, I also went to a thoughtful queer studies panel, responding to the 20th anniversary of Judith Butler’s Giving an Account of Oneself. As with the Critical AI panel I mentioned above, this one consisted of speakers who published essays in a special issue of Differences devoted to the topic. That special issue can be found here. Essentially, the panelists were all inspired by Butler’s work, and some of them found ways to apply her relatively abstract arguments about identity and relationality to specific questions of queer and trans identity. There was also a nice paper by Leigh Gilmore that was more focused on intellectual history – the friendship and correspondence between Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy.

Perhaps the most interesting moments at this panel were the ones related to the politics of the present moment. Jules Gill-Peterson gave a thoughtful provocation on the overwhelming dominance of anti-trans discourse in our public life (in a word: it’s not going anywhere; it’s getting worse). And in the Q&A, Judith Butler had a brilliant, apparently off-the-cuff riff about the recent Presidential election, where that absurd – but effective? – Trump anti trans-ad (“Kamala Harris supports transgender surgery for imprisoned illegal immigrants!”) led the Democrats to flail in response. Instead of supporting trans people and migrants, the best Democrats could do was turn to the right – actually we’re tougher on the border than Donald Trump! For Butler, that non-defense of trans people and migrants at a crucial moment speaks volumes.

Below is a more detailed overview of the specific panels I attended, divided into two sections, 1) African American Literature Panels and the Plenary, and 2) Digital Humanities Panels. * 

Slides for MLA 2025: Responsible Datasets in Context--African American Periodical Poetry

I'm on session 385 at the MLA this year, with my collaborators on the "Responsible Datasets in Context" grant I received last year. Here are my slides. 

385 Educating at the Intersection of Data Science and Humanities through Ethical and Responsible Contexts