The Humanities Institute Research cluster, “Humanities in the Age of AI,” is pleased to invite you to a series of meetings this winter quarter. The research cluster boasts a diverse group of core participants. This includes esteemed faculty members from various disciplines, graduate students representing politics, history, literature, philosophy, feminist studies, and film and visual studies, and undergraduate scholars from computer science, computational media, and creative writing.

This meeting is scheduled for March 4th (Tuesday) at noon in HUM 210 with guest speaker, Benjamin Breen. More information coming soon.

Benjamin Breen is an associate professor of history at UC Santa Cruz, where he teaches classes on early modern Europe, environmental history, and the history of science, technology, and medicine. From July 2015 to January 2017, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University and a lecturer in Columbia’s history department. He received his PhD in history from the University of Texas at Austin in 2015. His first book, The Age of Intoxication: Origins of the Global Drug Trade, was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2019. His second book, Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science, appeared in 2024. He lives in Santa Cruz, California, with his partner Roya Pakzad and their two daughters.