6-week festival of Digital Humanities in Aotearoa-New Zealand with Fulbright Specialist Alan Liu

Professor Alan Liu from the University of California Santa Barbara is visiting the University of Canterbury as a Fulbright Visiting Specialist. He will be giving public lectures in Wellington, Dunedin and Christchurch.

Alan is a Professor in the English Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an affiliated faculty member of UCSB’s Media Arts & Technology graduate program. Previously, he was on the faculty of Yale University’s English Department and British Studies Program.

While in New Zealand on his Fulbright Specialist Award, he will research and lecture on the field of digital humanities and its impact on the humanities and arts more generally including speaking at the following events, open to the public.

Christchurch

• Key Trends in Digital Humanities & their challenge to the idea of the Humanities. A public lecture by Professor Alan Liu, UC Santa Barbara. Undercroft 101, University of Canterbury. Wed. 28th October, 4-5.30pm
• The Future of the Humanities A workshop led by Prof. Alan Liu, UC Santa Barbara. Undercroft 101, University of Canterbury. Thurs. 5th November, 3-5 pm
• The Frontiers of Digital Humanities: Humanities Systems Infrastructure: Alan Liu, Paul Arthur, James Smithies followed by workshop discussion. James Hight 210, University of Canterbury. Thurs 12th November, 1-5pm.

Dunedin

• Literature+ A conversation about Alan Liu’s Literature+ course. Place TBC, University of Otago. Fri. 27th November, 2-3 pm.
• What Everyone Says – 4Humanities A public lecture by Prof. Alan Liu, UC Santa Barbara. Place TBC, University of Otago. Fri. 27th November, 5.15-6.15pm.

Wellington

• Key Trends in Digital Humanities & their challenge to the idea of the Humanities A public lecture by Prof. Alan Liu, UC Santa Barbara. Stout Centre, Kelburn Campus, Victoria University of Wellington. Tues. 1st December, 1-2:30 pm

About Alan Liu

He began his research in the field of British romantic literature and art. His first book, Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford Univ. Press, 1989), explored the relation between the imaginative experiences of literature and history. In a series of theoretical essays in the 1990s, he explored cultural criticism, the “new historicism,” and postmodernism in contemporary literary studies. In 1994, when he started his Voice of the Shuttle web site for humanities research, he began to study information culture as a way to close the circuit between the literary or historical imagination and the technological imagination.  In 2004, he published The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information (University of Chicago Press). He also published his Local Transcendence: Essays on Postmodern Historicism and the Database (University of Chicago Press) in 2008.