Sign-Up-Form: [Oct 2nd, 2026, Fri] Teaching Literature with Language Machines
Abstract
Recent work in the digital humanities demonstrates that long-standing literary categories such as genre, authorship, and character can be effectively operationalized through statistical models. The rise of artificial intelligence has greatly expanded this mode of scholarship. On the one hand, agentic systems allow scholars to generate hypotheses, experiment with corpora, and refine their questions much more rapidly within an iterative feedback loop. On the other hand, language models open new paths of inquiry, where the structural similarities between natural and artificial intelligence provide a vantage point on literary phenomena as multi-layered and poly-temporal processes. This talk presents several case studies from Sinophone literature that use this computational lens to re-examine interpretations grounded in established historiography, and demonstrates how to build a research environment that connects an open-source coding agent to a language model via an API, bringing corpora and secondary scholarship into a shared workflow. Rather than replacing close reading, AI‑enhanced pedagogies can offer students of literature new ways to test interpretations, to put their literary imaginations to work, and to ask how and why one reads in the age of language machines.
About the Speakers
Maciej Kurzynski is an Assistant Professor of Chinese at Lingnan University, Hong Kong. He holds a Ph.D. in modern Chinese literature and culture from Stanford University and previously studied at the University of Warsaw (B.A.) and Zhejiang University (M.A.). In his research and teaching, he draws inspiration from affective neuroscience and machine learning to experiment with texts and expand the traditional boundaries of literary studies.
Seminar Details
Title: Teaching Literature with Language Machines: New Pedagogies for Computational Literary Studies
Date: October 2, 2026 (Friday)
Time: 12:30 pm–2:00 pm (HKT)
Language: English
Venue: Arts Tech Lab (Room 4.35), 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU
This event is hosted by the HKU Arts Tech Lab.