INTELLIGENCE AND IMITATION: MIND, MECHANISM, MIMESIS
Humanities of AI Workshop
Johns Hopkins University
April 24–26, 2026

As a creative aspiration, the Greek notion of mimesis (“imitation”)
manifested not only in artistic works imitating reality and philosophical
speculation but also in scientific theories and mechanical artifacts.
Plato and Aristotle’s nous; Hobbes’s and La Mettrie’s machine-like mind
and world; the Jaquet-Droz automata; Kempelen’s chess-playing Turk;
Wiener’s cybernetic analogies; Mori’s “uncanny valley”; and Yuri
Lotman’s conception of culture as a collective mind exemplify the broad
relevance of imitation to science, literature, and culture.

Developments in artificial intelligence (AI) participate in this legacy
but also complicate it. Across AI’s research history, systems have been
claimed to represent, simulate, assist, improve upon, substitute for, or
replace human cognition. Concepts such as optimization, satisficing,
and superintelligence run orthogonal to classical notions of mimesis.

At the same time, developments in science and society have challenged
both mimesis and mindedness as ideals. Embodied and Darwinian cognition,
as well as analyses of labor, material reproduction, and social
stratification (Marx, Wallerstein, Pasquinelli, among others), call into
question the value and veracity of material imitations and accounts of
“intelligent” labor. Contemporary divisions in AI uptake—anti-AI
activism, competing governance regimes, and popular terms such as “AI
slop”—underscore these challenges.

We announce a three-day workshop for the presentation and discussion of
new humanities research engaging these themes. Our aim is to foster
critical engagement with AI in its history, socioeconomic context,
architecture, and cultural significance. We invite submissions from
early-career (including graduate students) and established scholars.

POSSIBLE TOPICS (non-exhaustive)

• Mimesis and mechanical imitation from antiquity to the transformer

• Transformer architectures and the hermeneutic circle

• Political economy of digital infrastructures sustaining LLMs

• New histories of literary cybernetics and NLP

• Human–LLM hybridity and joint agency

• Anthropomorphism and relations with the (in)animate

• Emotional AI as mimesis or optimization

The workshop will also include collective reflection on the humanities of
AI as a research domain: its present state, future directions, relations
to the sciences, and sociotechnical impact.

FEATURED SPEAKERS
Yulia Frumer (Johns Hopkins University)
Steven Gross (Johns Hopkins University)
N. Katherine Hayles (UCLA / Duke University, Emerita)
Matthew L. Jones (Princeton University)
Matthew Kirschenbaum (University of Virginia)
Patrick McCray (UC Santa Barbara / Library of Congress)
Alexander Williams Tolbert (Emory University)

SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS
Submit a single Word or PDF file by January 31 to:
Jiantong Liao (jliao20@jh.edu)

Please include:

• Abstract (~300 words)

• Short bio (name, affiliation, contact email)

• Up to five keywords

Decisions will be communicated within one month. Accepted participants
will be asked to submit up to 3,000 words for pre-circulation.

SUPPORTING INSTITUTIONS
Alexander Grass Humanities Institute, Johns Hopkins University
https://krieger.jhu.edu/humanities-institute/

Center for Equitable AI & Machine Learning Systems (CEAMLS),
Morgan State University
https://www.morgan.edu/ceamls

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
Jiantong Liao, Johns Hopkins University
Ksenia Tatarchenko, Johns Hopkins University
Phillip Honenberger, Morgan State University