Collection: Artificial Humanities

Series editor: Nina Beguš, University of California, Berkeley, 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. Philosophy, history, ethics, 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. 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.

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: products of imagination, labour, ideology, technical practice, and historical circumstance. Artificial systems, in this framing, is broader than technical systems: it includes imagined, fictional, mythological, and crafted synthetic agents, such as automata, artistic works, and literary characters, alongside their engineered successors and counterpoints. This perspective enables a deeper interrogation of artificial agency as extending and transforming longstanding human practices of making, representation, and world-creation.

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. The dominant discourse remains overwhelmingly Anglophone and Western, reproducing assumptions about agency, authorship, knowledge, and the human that are far from universal. Artificial Humanities actively works against this monocultural research lens by welcoming scholarship that brings also non-Western philosophical traditions, non-Anglophone literary and cultural archives, and comparative methodologies to the analysis of technology.

Repositioning technology from a merely engineering object to a social and cultural one requires the humanities at the forefront of understanding and making technology. 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. 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.

The series welcomes work that draws on the fields of Science and Technology Studies, Philosophy of Technology, Literary Studies, Film and Media Studies, Rhetoric, Digital Anthropology, and beyond.

The scope of the series includes but is not limited to:

• Humanistic analysis of AI, synthetic media and other digital systems, biotechnology and neurotechnology, including the cultural infrastructures that support them and the futures they make possible or foreclose.
• Histories and genealogies tracing the philosophical, literary, and material antecedents of today’s information technologies and biotechnologies.
• Cross-cultural and comparative analyses of how different traditions have conceptualized and practiced artifice in the light of technological transformation.
• Studies of language, vision, and knowledge production in relation to how technology reshapes our understanding of authorship, creativity, evidence, truth, objectivity.
• Fiction and narratives, the technology representations and the cultural imaginaries of synthetic life that shape technological and cultural developm...