A 2026 VIRTUAL CONFERENCE
Research in the Age of AI
Call for Proposals
Research in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
12–13 March 2026 (Virtual)
Sponsored by the University Writing Program at the University of Florida
Details
We should notice when something disappears and what emerges in its wake if not place (e.g., pay phones to cellphones). Likewise, we should notice when things reappear and examine what it indicates (e.g., increasing record player sales). The library card catalog disappeared as we banned Wikipedia from papers. Google Scholar stole traffic from the stacks as notebooks and folders went digital. While searching and its algorithms tend not to surface texts as relevant as exploring now dimly-lit basement shelves, reading, we are told, is as seemingly on the outs as writing. AI is here.
Some professors are returning to older ways, including in-class oral and written exams. Process-based research, however, with emphases on cutting and bleeding edges, the advanced, and the current is perhaps best primed to resist such in-class restrictions. Research outside the classroom, from libraries and labs to museums and site visits, could remain just as valuable today as what one might hope to find tomorrow through AI resources.
In time, research in the age of AI will likely be additive. The cutting edge need not be a razor. We are learning lessons, gaining experiences, and discovering strengths and weaknesses through trials and errors before new standards, practices, and conventions emerge. Let’s discuss that space and what is possible within it. What does discovery mean today? What are your students finding? What are you accepting and rejecting? What are you finding in your work? How are processes changing? How are you integrating AI into research? How are you teaching research today?
In 2023, we hosted a conference on Writing in the Age of AI. Then, in 2024, our focus changed to Teaching in the Age of AI. For the fall of 2025, we encourage faculty to sponsor spaces in their classrooms to try new research approaches, enough to discuss them in the spring of 2026. In what began as a reaction to AI that moved to adaptation to AI, our upcoming conference will focus on integration and the consequences that issue therefrom, whether appearing as benefits or pitfalls and whether realized as good, bad, and everything in-between.
In this spirit, we invite proposals that address AI and research thoughtfully, dynamically, and compellingly from the humanities classroom and your work outside it. To these ends, we are interested in topics that not only span but also go beyond the following list of possibilities:
Pedagogy
- Teaching AI Research
- Teaching and Experiences with AI Research Resources, Tools, Products, Platforms, Services
- Creating Research Assignments for, beyond, outside, with AI
- Revisiting Tradition Because of or to Avoid or Resist AI
- Assignments Created and Revised for AI
- Pasts, Fads, and Futures
Policy
- Crafting, Deploying, Enforcing, and Resisting the Syllabus, Department, and University Policy Statement
- The Class Talk about AI Policy
- Policing AI Research
Partners
- Grant Writing, Research Funding, and AI
- Centers for Teaching Excellence and AI
- Writing Center Encounters and Responses to AI Research
- Libraries, Librarians, and Literacy (especially AI Guides)
- Authors, Authority, and the AI as Collaborative Partner
- Cross-Silo Collaboration and Interdisciplinary Work with/on AI and AI Research
Process
- Designing and Engineering Research Prompts
- Engagement and Selection
- Access and Stratification
- Work and Workflows
- Methods, Discoveries, and Hallucinations
- Undertaking Research with AI
- Data Analysis with AI
- Source, Sources, and Sourcing with AI
- Assessment and Evaluating with or of AI
- Exercises, Strategies, and Techniques using AI
- Case Studies of AI Technologies, Platforms, Services
- Introductory Composition and Research Modules
Philosophy
- Beliefs about Research, Process, and Results
- (Dis/En)couragement to Deploy or Avoid AI during or in Research
- AI and the Nature and Work of Discovery
- Hallucinations, the Unexpected, and Epistemology
- Conducting Research, Research Methods, Paths of Process
- Conceptualizing, Making, and Training Scholars and Researchers
Publishing
- AI in as or during Peer Review, Peer Reviewing AI, and AI as a Non-Peer
- AI Interpretations of and Recommendations for Peer Review Reports; or, How I Learned to Respond to Reviewer 2
- Detection, Detail, and Disclosure
- Openness and Outcomes
Performance
- AI Research Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow
- Capabilities, Capacities, and Canaries
- Using, Evaluating, Contributing to, and Spotting AI Research
Submissions
Submissions from graduate students and faculty of all ranks and status are welcome. To overcome travel funding and logistics obstacles, particularly for international colleagues, this will be a virtual, asynchronous conference of exhibits, pre-recorded videos, content posts, posters, etc. Creativity in approach and style is encouraged. To promote engagement, conversations, and community, questions and reasonable commentary and questions for panelists will be required amongst panelists within assigned panels and at least once without. Responses during the conference will be slated within a 24-hour period allocated to the panel.
Submission Process
Please respond to the CFP using the form below. For questions, please reach out by email to Zea Miller (zea.miller@ufl.edu).
Deadline
22 December 2025