Humanities Division

The College of Arts & Sciences celebrates undergraduate and graduate students from across all four divisions, who are recognized for making the most of their time at the UW. 

Recent faculty books from the University of Washington include those from linguistics, Slavic languages and literature and French. UW News spoke with the authors of four publications to learn more about their work. Scrutinizing and confronting AI hype Emily M. Bender, UW professor of linguistics, co-authored The AI Con: How to Fight Big Techs Hype...

Virtual assistants, such as Apples Siri, can perform a range of tasks or services for users and a majority of them sound like white women. Golden Marie Owens, assistant professor of cinema and media studies at the University of Washington, says there is much to learn about a person from how they sound. The...

Speculative fiction author Anselma Prihandita (PhD, language and rhetoric, 2025), a Nebula Award winner, finds that her creative writing bolsters her scholarly work in unexpected ways. 

Emily M. Bender, professor of linguistics at the UW, and Alex Hanna share five key insights from their new book,"The AI Con: How to Fight Big Techs Hype and Create the Future We Want." This bookis an exploration of the hype around artificial intelligence, whose interests it serves and the harm being done under this umbrella.

Imagine an art class where you only did paint by numbers, or a music class where you werent allowed to play a song until you practiced scales for 20 years. This is often what its like to take a math class, where students spend most of their time learning to solve problems that have already...

"Unfortunately, the goal of creating artificial general intelligence isnt just a project that lives as a hypothetical in scientific papers. Theres real money invested in this work, much of it coming from venture capitalists," co-writes Emily M. Bender, professor of linguistics at the UW.

Is artificial intelligence coming for everyones jobs? Not if this lot have anything to do with it. Emily M. Bender, professor of linguistics at the UW, is quoted.

The kingdom of Aksum was one of the most powerful empires in the world in the fourth century. It played a major role in the histories of Egypt, Persia and Rome, as well as the early days of Christianity and Islam. But Aksums accomplishments have long been overlooked because they are recorded in the ancient...

There is more to literature than the text itself. Anything that surrounds the text from the cover to chapter headings and author bios is known as paratext. This is what transforms text into a book.   Richard Wattss research focuses on this under-examined aspect of literature. In this episode, Watts, an associate professor...

English, philosophy and comparative literature aren’t typically subjects that come to mind when thinking about big datasets. But the intersection between literature and data analysis is exactly where Anna Preus works. This is the first episode of Season 2 of Ways of Knowing, a podcast highlighting how studies of the humanities reflect everyday life.

Dont callChatGPTa chatbot. Call it a conversation simulator. Dont think ofDALL-Eas a creator of artistic imagery. Instead, think of it as a synthetic media extruding machine. In fact, avoid thinking that what generative AI does is actually artificial intelligence. Emily M. Bender, professor of linguistics at the UW, is quoted.

Poet and teacher Martha Silano, ’93, died May 5, 2025, at the age of 63. A nationally renowned poet and beloved teacher, she captured the impacts of the climate crisis in her poetry. Martha received a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from the UW.

The Office of Global Affairs celebrates Tony Lucero for the Global Visionaries series. Dr. José Antonio (Tony) Lucero, is Professor and Chair of the Comparative History of Ideas Department and a Professor in the Jackson School of International Studies. He describes his experience centering reciprocity in his research and teaching, and leading study abroad programs to Peru and Ecuador.

Because of its unique status in the modern world, myths and misunderstandings about Chinese characters abound. Where does this writing system, so different in form and function from alphabetic writing, come from? How does it really work? By exploring the spread and adaptation of the script across two millennia and thousands of miles, Chinese Characters across Asia: How the Chinese Script Came to Write Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese (University of Washington Press, 2025) by Dr. Zev Handel addresses these questions and provides insights into human cognition and culture.