It is a pleasure to join the Hereford community as Principal in this year of renovation and renewal. I look forward to living and thinking with the diverse and engaged students of Hereford College.
As Principal, I’m tasked with bringing an academic focus to the College, and I’d like to take the next two years to reflect on our AI moment—the hype, the slop, and the looming crash—through a workshop series on artifice and creativity. Our main effort will be to think together about authoring, making, shaping, and the limits of artificial and push-button creativity.
In the shadow of AI, the hands-on work called “critical making” seems especially vital to me, and I will be involving Hereford students in a range of arts and traditional crafts: poetry and sculpture, video installation, knitting, cooking, and wood-block printing. We’ll tour the Maker Spaces and labs on Grounds and get our hands dirty. In this dematerialized moment of digital media and doomscrolling, I will host a “Making Tea” workshop series at Vaughan House, and I've scheduled visiting professors and artists to meet with us. For Spring Break, we'll visit Los Angeles, city of tinsel and quartz. And we'll plan and host an Alternate Reality Game (an ARG) for the wider UVA community. I hope my Herefordians become keen makers and develop new resistances to the incessant prattle of chatbots.
I root much of my own thinking about critical making in poetry (poesis, from the Greek ποιεῖν, means making), but I am, by training, a student of the eighteenth century, an English professor drawn to the overlapping humanistic disciplines of philosophy, history, music, art, and literature. I'm ready to think through a much longer history of technology and media archaeology with you—at least back to the early American and Enlightenment contexts of UVA’s founding and the material cultures made patent by UVA’s Palladian architecture. I’m eager to meet Hereford’s many majors and be deliriously interdisciplinary for the next few years.
