Collection: Artificial Humanities

Series editor: Nina Beguš, University of California, Berkeley, USA

Editorial advisory board members:

Stanley Qiufan Chen, Hong Kong Metropolitan University, Hong Kong

Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal, University of Basel, Switzerland

N. Katherine Hayles, University of California, Los Angeles, USA

Meredith Martin, Princeton University, USA

Pamela Samuelson, University of California, Berkeley, USA

Jeffrey Schnapp, Harvard University, USA

Leif Weatherby, New York University, USA

The Artificial Humanities book series brings the depth, craft, and historical range of humanistic inquiry to the artificial systems reshaping human and more-than-human life. At a time when technological systems increasingly shape perception, knowledge production, and policies, humanistic inquiry makes visible the embedded cultural assumptions, historical genealogies, narrative forms, and value systems. Philosophy, history, ethics, law, literature, art, media and cultural studies, and critical theory each offer tools for understanding and spaces for imagining how AI, biotechnology, neurotechnology, and other powerful technologies are made, what they do, and what they mean.

The series aims to establish a critical and foundational dialogue between the humanities and the rapidly accelerating technological fields of the twenty-first century. The main goal of this series is to bring humanistic insights to the centre of our decisions around the creation, use, and broader implementation of seismic technologies. Moving beyond the application of technology to the humanities, the series inverts the lens by applying humanistic inquiry to diagnose, critique, and inform the creation, deployment, and impact of complex technological systems. The series will encompass but also go beyond artificial intelligence, to include other seismic technologies that are reshaping human and more-than-human futures, considered through a humanistic lens. The goal is to shift the debate from purely technical to one centred on cultural consequence, ethical governance, and the re-definition of the human in an age of artificial agency. Revamping our criteria, concepts, and vocabulary around the human and nonhuman, Artificial Humanities questions historical contingencies and cultural differences that run through our technical artefacts. Repositioning technology from a merely engineering object to a social and cultural one requires the humanities at the forefront of understanding and making technology.

A defining commitment of the series is its cross-cultural and comparative ambition. AI and other seismic technologies are not culturally neutral: they are built within specific linguistic, ideological, and geopolitical contexts, yet deployed globally. Artificial Humanities actively works against the dominant monocultural research lens, overwhelmingly Anglophone and Western, by welcoming scholarship that brings also non-Western philosophical traditions and comparative methodologies to the analysis of technology.

At the heart of the series is the word artificial itself. Derived from artificium, combining ars (skill, craft, art) and facere (to make or do), the artificial has historically denoted the domain of human making, technique, and creativity. It was not simply opposed to the human; rather, it was one of the human’s oldest expressions. Returning to this lineage allows the series to treat artificial systems not as alien intrusions into culture, but as cultural artefacts in their own right.

The series invites research monographs, agenda-setting short-form books, and edited collections of papers, essays, and other forms that articulate new theoretical frameworks and present original research at the critical intersection of technology and human experience.

To discuss your book proposal please contact:

the Series Editor: Nina Beguš, University of California, Berkeley, nbegus@berkeley.edu

or Commissioning Editor: Becky Taylor, b.taylor@exeterpress.co.uk