Department of English

• Wednesday, October 22, 2025 - 5:00pm to 7:00pm

Fisher-Bennett Hall Faculty Lounge, room 135

Criticism & The Chatbot Bubble  One thing Christopher Newfield's work has enduringly shown is that external defunding of humanities disciplines is inevitably misrepresented as internal crises. Humanities scholars are accused of failing to adequately assert their relevance, agree upon their methods, market themselves to students, or create competitive graduates. Newfield inevitably shows that such arguments fail to hold water even on their own terms, while disguising and revisioning decisions actually made by academic administrators, government officials, and private partners. The most recent wave of humanities cuts have been justified by the imminent automation of language and literature education by artificial intelligence and the allegedly "out of touch" radicalisms of associated faculty. In this conversation, which will be recorded as part of the forthcoming "Vandal Live" series of The American Vandal Podcast, Newfield, Whitney Trettien, and Matt Seybold discuss the incursions of "technofeudal education," the distinction between technical tools and speculative capital, both subsumed under the title of "A.I.," and the tactics available to scholars, teachers, and writers when, as Paul Krugman puts it, "the bubble ends: not with a pop, but with smog and brownouts."