Research and writing a co-authored book on existential philosophy and artificial intelligence. 

Our proposed project is to complete a monograph on philosophical issues connected to existentialism and artificial intelligence titled, Robot Existentialism: Artificial Intelligence and the Limits of Rationality. We argue that a full understanding of human agency requires a recognition of the limits of rationality, together with an emphasis on the value of creation, including especially self-creation. The book engages with philosophical work on personal identity, the philosophy of mind, practical reason, and ethics, as well as work in artificial intelligence and aligned empirical fields to develop a unified view of a distinctive aspect of agency that is currently lacking in artificial beings. The expected final outcome of this collaborative team project will be the complete, publication-ready manuscript of the book, in addition to two pieces of public philosophy and presentations drawing on ideas in the book.

The historical analysis of how safety mechanisms for firearms have evolved and been marketed to consumers over time.

This multi-disciplinary humanities research collaboration, co-directed by a professor of history specializing in nineteenth-century technology and visual culture and a professor of emergency medicine, will include archival study of an aspect of firearms history that previously has received little study: the evolution of designs and instructions for firearms safety through the lens of engineering and marketing. Patents, firearm components, safety records, use instructions, medical writings and other records are all part of the objects of the study, which will also integrate visual and computational analyses by undergraduate and medical student researchers.

Research and oral history workshops supporting the publication of a book analyzing the circulation of misinformation among Asian and Asian-American community digital communication networks.  

Transnational Disinformation Networks and Asian Diasporic Politics is a collaborative project between Dr. Rachel Kuo (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) and Mark Calaguas (Alliance of Filipinos for Immigrant Rights and Empowerment and the Filipino Young Leaders Program). We bring together archival research and community oral histories to examine memory, political histories, and information networks across Asian and Asian American diasporas. We seek to understand how lived experiences of trauma, war, colonialism, and political suppression and social and cultural hierarchies of power undergird the spread of mis- and disinformation. We plan to host community storytelling workshops to train community volunteers to collect intergenerational and multilingual oral histories. By focusing on historical and geopolitical frameworks, our project intervenes in contemporary debates about mis- and disinformation, technology, and democracy.

Development of a podcast series and scholarly book chapters analyzing how persistent narratives of slavery and servitude have influenced popular understanding of artificial intelligence and humans’ ethical engagement with emerging technologies.

Our goal is to investigate how legacies of slavery, as a set of emotional frameworks for determining the parameters of the human, are shaping the perception and reception of conversational artificial intelligence (AI). Much of this framing is done, we aver, through popular culture and the discourse it provokes regarding the scope of human rights. Our key activities are the research, production, and dissemination of six digitally accessible research conversations and two book chapters. Our expected final outcome is to bring past and present conceptions of slavery and servitude, as mediated by popular cultural representations of conversational AI, into the dialogue surrounding the ethical development of AI. This work is vital as we move into a future in which concepts of human dignity and freedom will be reshaped by AI in ways fraught with both danger and opportunity. As the Director and Associate Director of UConn’s Humanities Institute, we are applying as a collaborative team.

The humanistic analysis of the changing demographics related to purchasing and owning firearms in the United States. 

Gun ownership in the United States has skyrocketed in recent years. New gun owners are 40% of purchasers, and women, people of color, members of the LGBTQ+ community, and self-defined “liberals” are arming themselves at unprecedented rates. Focusing on the changing demographics of gun ownership, this project seeks to 1) understand the symbolic dimensions of firearms as a technology; 2) understand the relationship of this technology to gun cultures; and 3) explore the implications of this relationship for gun violence. Gun research in the United States is largely dominated by a focus on epidemiology and criminology, i.e. what happens after the technology is used as a weapon of destruction. To understand and ameliorate the roots of this violence, we also need to understand the cultures and meanings of gun ownership and gun technology prior to its use.

Research and writing leading to a scholarly monograph about the modern history of transportation technology in Japan.

The Rickshaw and the Railroad examines the intellectual and social history of transportation in nineteenth through twenty-first century Japan. It argues that transportation is a keyword of modern history. It is a contested concept that historical actors and historians alike use to symbolize the past, define the modern and pre-modern eras, and critique the present and envision the future. Interweaving the histories of rickshaw pullers with human-car railway pushers, truck drivers, and parcel delivery workers, The Rickshaw and the Railroad shows that, (a) for over one hundred years, the promise that cheaper and faster transportation would benefit society at large has been used to override the concerns of those who sought to protect transport as a livelihood; and, (b) on a broad scale transport change has continually reproduced, rather than eliminated, the need for precarious human labor in transportation systems.

Research and writing leading to a scholarly monograph about the modern history of the use of natural gas in Iran. 

This project focuses on the history natural gas in 20th-century Iran, using the energy source—as both a varied material substance and an object of discourse—as a lens to study the country’s developmental programs, its charged politics of modernization, and their connection to the natural world. It follows the movement of gas from underground reservoirs through infrastructures of refining and distribution into everyday life, in the process exploring the roles of planners, oil firms, industrialists, consumers, mountain ranges, sedimentary rock, and natural gas itself. Drawing upon perspectives from Middle Eastern history, science and technology studies, and political ecology, it contributes to our knowledge of modern Iran, the creation of fossil fuel energy systems in the Global South, the role of anticolonial politics in the rise of hydrocarbon energy regimes and the climate crises they have spawned, and the theorization of precarity as an entrepot to studying human-nature interactions.

Research and development of a scholarly monograph on the history of the computational approaches to healthcare, 1960s-2000s. 

This project seeks to determine the implicit humanistic values embedded in the design and use of healthcare technologies. Through archival research and analysis of audiovisual media produced by medical professionals and technology developers, this project will explain how early ideas about emerging healthcare technologies transformed patient care by envisioning human bodies as quantitative data. This move not only excluded the messy, non-linear, emotional, and unpredictable aspects of embodied illness experiences, it also excluded the experiences of gendered, racialized, and minoritized patients. By examining how future uses of computers in healthcare were imagined from the 1960s onward, this project will show how the development of computational approaches to patient care worked precisely by erasing the human elements of illness and healing. A resulting book manuscript, The Visual History of Computational Health, will narrate the throughline from these early imaginings to the present.

Research and writing a book on the ethical impact of distraction by digital technology. 

The founder of Napster said that digital distractions like notifications and ads are made to “consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible… God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.” This is typical of Silicon Valley’s “move fast, break things” ethos. Companies change our lives and minds without knowing the risks and opportunities. One risk is familiar: digital distractions undermine our capacity to pay attention. The Spontaneity Deficit will identify another risk. Digital technologies not only make us more distracted; they also change how we are distracted. Our minds used to wander during idly times like riding a bus or walking. Digital distractions are instead designed to leave us “stuck” on a salient topic, such as moral outrage or doom-scrolling. This deficit of mind-wandering––the eponymous spontaneity deficit––is a problem because our idly ramblings are a fount of creative insight.

Development of a scholarly monograph on the history of the Dulles Corridor Metrorail Project.  

The Dulles Corridor Metrorail Project extends the Washington Metro rail transit system for twenty-three miles from Arlington, Virginia, through Tysons Corner and Washington Dulles International Airport into Loudoun County. The project is remarkable for two reasons: space and time. Physically, it consists of a heavy rail rapid transit system—traditionally an urban technology—built far outside a traditional downtown. Temporarily, it is a massive infrastructure project built long after the end of the federal largesse that funded the original Metro system. My research therefore has two main questions. First, how did the creators of this project overcome suburban skepticism about transit? And secondly, how did they do so in an era of fiscal austerity? My book project, Rail against Sprawl, seeks to answer those questions, and to explore the dangers and opportunities of rail rapid transit in the twenty-first century.

Research and writing of a scholarly monograph on the intersections of information technology, warfare, and state sovereignty with a focus on war planning, drone warfare, and digital mapping. 

This project explores how digital technologies of warfare are reshaping the sovereign state. Historically, states emerged out of institutional changes driven in large part by military competition. Today, however, the technologies of war—more than war itself—are driving state transformation. The resulting book will apply humanistic and social-science methods to examine three intersections between information technology, warfare, and statehood today: planning wars in the virtual domain of cybersecurity, fighting wars remotely through drones, and negotiating resolutions to conflicts through digital mapping. All three cases reveal how representations— conceptual, linguistic, and visual—are an important but largely overlooked element in the political consequences of technological change. Key representations are reshaping how territorial borders function, how new forms of interstate violence are deployed, and how states seek to govern new domains such as the internet.

Research and analysis of the history and development of the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico and the multifaceted impacts on local residents and communities.  

Large research facilities such as astronomical observatories are essential to the advancement of science, but their value to host communities is not always clear. Though social impact assessments for research facilities are often undertaken, proposed facilities can cause tremendous social friction. The proposed project therefore offers a step towards redressing this gap of knowledge, proposing a situational analysis of the history of decision-making that enables the formation of new research infrastructures and the consequences of those decisions as science-society interactions at the sites and host localities of large-scale research infrastructures throughout their lifecycle (i.e., their development, establishment, operation, and decommission) through a case study of the history of the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico.

Research and writing of a work of public scholarship, a monograph on the history of life support technology and its impact on American culture.

My project is a history of life support technology in the United States and how it changed American death in the 20th century. It will take the form of a book manuscript focused on the history of the ventilator and its use in the intensive care unit between 1950 and 2000, telling the story of how both medicine and society created, responded to, and interacted with this technology. I will also look at how two early 20th-century devices—the pulmotor resuscitation machine in the 1910s–20s and the iron lung in the 1930s–50s—played foundational roles in this history, not only in technological development but in the broader medical, cultural, and popular discourse about the use of technology at the end of life. The book will be aimed at both an academic and general audience and will use methods and approaches from the academic history of medicine, science and technology studies, and literary journalism.

Ethnographic research culminating in several scholarly articles and a monograph investigating whether precision medicine helps prevent or reproduce health disparities.

This project will ethnographically investigate whether precision medicine can contribute to reducing health disparities experienced by racialized peoples or if it will reproduce such disparities in the genetics-based language of precision medicine. Employing recent insights from the historical study of genetics and postcolonial science studies, this project will trace the processes by which medical researchers practice precision medicine, and deploy the language of this scientific field, as a form of preventative care that addresses health disparities experienced by racialized peoples in Canada. In scholarly articles and a monograph, the findings of this project will contribute to debates within the humanities about bioethics, race and social justice, and postcolonial science. It will contribute to broader audiences including racialized communities, educators, decision-makers in public health discussions through a conference/knowledge exchange, op-eds, social media and podcasts.

This project will publish the book Imagination and Science in Romanticism, written by NEH Fellow Richard C. Sha (NEH grant number FA-56408-12), in an electronic open access format under a Creative Commons license, making it available for free download and distribution. The author will be paid a royalty of at least $500 upon release of the open access edition.

This project will result in the publishing of the electronic open-access version of the book The Rise of Euroskepticism: Europe & Its Critics in Spanish Culture, authored by NEH Fellow Luis Martin-Estudillo (NEH grant number FA-58154-15). The open-access format will be published under a Creative Commons license, rendering it free for download and distribution. With the release of the eBook, Luis Martin-Estudillo will receive at least $500 in royalty payment.

This project will publish the book "American Girls in Red Russia: Chasing the Soviet Dream," written by Julia L. Mickenberg (NEH grant number FA5576111), in an electronic open access format under a Creative Commons license, making it available for free download and distribution. The author will be paid a royalty of at least $500 upon release of the open access ebook.

This project will publish the book "Make It Rain: State Control of the Atmosphere in Twentieth-Century America," written by Kristine C. Harper (NEH grant number FB-53252-07), in an electronic open access format under a Creative Commons license, making it available for free download and distribution. The author will be paid a royalty of at least $500 upon release of the open access ebook.

The purpose of this project is to seek support for open-access digital publication of Whitney Trettien's book "Cut/Copy/Paste: Echoes of Little Gidding" on the Manifold Scholarship digital publishing platform.

This project will publish the book Transforming Women’s Education: Liberal Arts and Music in Female Seminaries, written by NEH Fellow Jewel A. Smith (NEH grant number FA-53416-07), in an electronic open access format under a Creative Commons license, making it available for free download and distribution. The author will be paid a royalty of $500 upon release of the open access book.

Photographic Presidents tells a history of photography through stories of how presidents shaped and participated in transformative moments in the history of the medium. Cara A. Finnegan analyzes a wealth of newspaper and magazine articles, letters to the editor, trial testimony, books, and speeches produced by viewers in response to specific photos they encountered in public. Finnegan treats the photograph as a locus for viewer engagement and constructs a history of photography's viewers that shows how Americans used words about images to participate in the politics of their day. As she shows, encounters with photography helped viewers negotiate the emergent anxieties and crises of U.S. public life through not only persuasion but action as well. Telling a new story about a medium and an institution that have largely grown up together, this book offers readers an accessible, visually engaging story about photography, the presidency, and public life.

This project will publish the book Xuanhe Catalogue of Painting, written by NEH Fellow Amy McNair (NEH grant number FA-52418-06), in an electronic open access format under the Creative Commons license CC BY-ND 4.0, making it available for free download and distribution. The author will be paid a royalty of at least $500 upon release of the open access ebook.

This project will publish the book Thomas Mann’s War, written by NEH Fellow Tobias Boes (NEH grant number FA-57586-14), in an electronic open access format under the Creative Commons license CC BY-ND 4.0, making it available for free download and distribution. The author will be paid a royalty of at least $500 upon release of the open access ebook.

This project will publish the book Pauulu’s Diaspora: Black Internationalism and Environmental Justice, written by NEH Fellow Quito J. Swan (NEH grant number FA-57763-14), in an electronic open access format under a Creative Commons license, specifically CC BY-NC-ND, making it available for free download and distribution. The hardback and epdf version of this book was published in April 2020 by the University Press of Florida. Dr. Quito Swan will be paid a royalty of $600 upon release of the open access ebook.

This project will publish the book A Saint of Our Own: How the Quest for a Holy Hero Helped Catholics Become American, written by NEH Fellow Kathleen Cummings (NEH grant number FA-55091-10), in an electronic open access format under a Creative Commons license, making it available for free download and distribution. The author will be paid a royalty of at least $500 upon release of the open access ebook.