Harpur Calendar of Events

Art & Design: Exhibition Opening - Aurora Andrews

On View 11/13-12/11/2025 | M-F 9-5 p.m.

Rosefsky Gallery | Free Admission

An exciting mix of instrumentations featuring new works by BU Composers. Free Admission

Dennis Yi Tenen, associate professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, will join the speaker series Critical Perspectives on AI, Data, and Narrative with a talk on the methodological and ethical challenges of studying digital communities that operate in ambiguous legal and moral terrains. The talk takes up the problem of doing ethnography online—what it means to study digital communities that thrive in the gray zones of legality or morality. Drawing on the sociology of culture, media theory, and platform studies, Tenen focuses on Library Genesis, one of the internet’s largest “pirate” libraries. The case raises difficult questions about how to write about underground infrastructures without exposing them, and how to care for both the researcher and the researched community in spaces built to resist visibility. Contact:   Francesco Agnellini, fagnellini@binghamton.edu or Junting Huang, jhuang119@binghamton.edu

Nina Beguš, Lecturer at the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine & Society at UC Berkeley, will join the speaker series Critical Perspectives on AI, Data, and Narrative with a talk on the cultural, philosophical, and ethical dimensions of artificial intelligence. The talk examines how fictional narratives shape our understanding of computational technologies and how the humanities can offer critical tools for interpreting AI’s development. Drawing on literature, media theory, and the history of science, Beguš traces connections from Pygmalion’s Eliza Doolittle to Weizenbaum’s ELIZA, moving through works such as Richard Powers’s Galatea 2.2 and the films Her and Ex Machina, before turning to contemporary large language models. The case raises questions about how stories inform technological imaginaries, and how humanistic approaches can illuminate the cultural and philosophical implications of machines that use human languages. Contact:  Junting Huang  jhuang119@binghamton.edu Francesco Agnellini fagnellini@binghamton.edu