The American Historical Review has published a call for proposals for a series in their History Lab.
The general tenor of conversations around artificial intelligence (AI) leans toward novelty or rupture. Yet these sorts of “unprecedented” historical phenomenon are, very often, not unprecedented at all. Everything has a history, even AI, and historians are uniquely positioned to complicate these narratives of novelty.
The AHR calls for proposals for essays that frame AI not as a contemporary technology to be used or rejected but instead as a historical and historiographic phenomenon to be contextualized, interrogated, and reinterpreted. Our goal is to reframe AI within existing historiographies of labor, empire, economy, culture, science, and human agency, and in doing so, reshape our shared understanding of AI and its role in the discipline of history. By considering the contingencies and continuities of AI as a phenomenon of both continuity and disruption, we hope to provide an empirical basis on which historians who do not specialize in AI or histories of technology can build as we consider the ethical and moral boundaries of AI in historical research and teaching.
See the AHR website for more information and to submit a proposal.