Overview
Research and teaching interests: online and platform culture; culture and AI; computational study of culture and literature.
Most recent book: Fast Culture, Slow Justice: How Digital Platforms Failed Black Lives Matter (Columbia UP, 2026).
Recent papers: "Why Slop Matters" (ACM - AI Letters 2026); "The Social AI Author (AI & Society 2026); "Critical Confabulation (ICLR 2026).
Office Hours
'25 Fall Semester:
Thursdays 3:30-5:00 pm (304 C)
Thursdays 3:30-5:00 pm (304 C)
Current Duke Appointments & Affiliations
Michael G. Rhodes and Maureen C. Rhodes Associate Professor in the Digital Humanities
·
2025 - Present
English,
Trinity College of Arts & Sciences
Associate Professor of English
·
2025 - Present
English,
Trinity College of Arts & Sciences
Recent Scholarly Works
The social AI author: modeling creativity and distinction in simulated cultural fields
Journal article AI and Society · May 1, 2026 This article examines generative AI models as sociocultural actors, focusing on how they reproduce and constrain notions of authorship and identity within the contemporary U.S. literary field. Through a simulation of 101 “AI authors” modeled on real-world ... Full text CiteWhat Does AI Do for Cultural Interpretation? A Randomized Experiment on Close Reading Poems with Exposure to AI Interpretation
Conference Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Proceedings · April 13, 2026 AI demonstrates unprecedented reasoning capabilities, but its increasing integration into human reasoning via automated reading and summarization has provoked debate about its use for cultural interpretation. Close reading - the practice of understanding, ... Full text CiteComputational hermeneutics: evaluating generative AI as a cultural technology.
Journal article Frontiers in artificial intelligence · January 2026 Generative AI (GenAI) systems are increasingly recognized as cultural technologies, yet current evaluation frameworks often treat culture as a variable to be measured rather than fundamental to the system's operation. Drawing on hermeneutic theory from the ... Full text CiteEducation
Columbia University ·
2010
Ph.D.
Brown University ·
2001
B.A.