AI@SACoLM

In the upcoming years (2026–2028), the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, including the associated Program in Film and Media Studies at Yale University and the Department of German and Scandinavian Studies at the University of Zurich will focus on a highly relevant research topic, in order to create long-term institutional collaboration:

Already today—and even more in the future, AI exerts significant pressure on literary and media studies. Current research faces a constitutive ambivalence: AI challenges humankind by transforming how knowledge is acquired, transmitted, and distributed. Thus, AI has contributed to a global crisis. At the same time, AI provides literary and media studies with powerful new analytical tools, raising questions around capabilities and limits of advanced language models in the production, reception, and analyses of literature and media.

AI’s negative and positive challenges mark the research desideratum that AI@SACoLM will fulfill. However, instead of aiming at general answers, research and teaching will focus on the closely connected areas of Switzerland and Austria, which share positions vis-à-vis the German mainstream, to find culturally specific answers to a global problem.

Principal Investigators: Fatima Naqvi  & Frauke Berndt