New Program in DH & AI launched by Arts & Sciences

Associate Dean of Arts and Humanities Willis Jenkins announced the fall 2026 launch of a new Program in Digital Humanities & AI in the College of Arts & Sciences.  Matthew Kirschenbaum, Commonwealth Professor of Artificial Intelligence and English, will serve as the inaugural Faculty Director. The program will be the academic home for the Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities, which Rennie Mapp will continue to direct. 

According to Jenkins, the former Digital Humanities Initiative (DHI) will be elevated into the new program in recognition of sustained student interest in the Digital Humanities Graduate Certificate, emerging undergraduate interest, and the need to connect growing faculty engagement with AI to our existing digital humanities expertise and infrastructure. 

We look forward to the program's role on the front lines in strengthening faculty community and cultivating research collaboration across Arts & Sciences, with programming and opportunities to join in the coming months" 
--Willis Jenkins, Associate Dean of Arts & Humanities

A major advantage for the new program is the appointment of Kirschenbaum, who completed his PhD in the English Department at UVA in 1999 and rejoined UVA as Commonwealth Professor of AI in spring 2026. This new leadership role connects his involvement as a graduate student UVA's early achievements in the digital humanities with his current work on artificial intelligence. Kirschenbaum also serves as co-director, with Kevin Driscoll, of the new Humanities + AI Lab (HAIL) sponsored by the Institute for the Arts & Humanities (formerly IHGC).  He is an active member of the Modern Language Association’s task force on AI in Research and Teaching, and has been a Guggenheim and an NEH Fellow.

Digital Humanities at UVA has a legacy stretching back decades, and indeed the term was coined here. Since then, faculty and librarians, as well as the centers and institutes and labs constituting the DH ecosystem, have trained literally hundreds of graduate students for whom the experience has been career defining. Now, in the time of generative AI, our unique methodologies' critical perspectives are all the more essential.
--Matthew Kirschenbaum, Faculty Director of the new Program in DH & AI 

The Program in DH & AI will be the academic home for the Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities, which will continue under the direction of Rennie Mapp. Since the Certificate program enrolled its first students in 2018, Mapp has shaped its curriculum around an approach she calls "DH in the Disciplines": treating digital methods not as a separate specialization, but as a set of approaches and methods that help students explore the questions that each discipline already cares about. Under this model, enrollment has grown from an initial cohort of five students to about 50 today, drawn from 13 graduate programs across the University. She is confident that the DH Certificate's new home will bring significant advantages to its students.

As a key constituency of the new Program in DH & AI, this generation of DH Certificate students will gain theoretical and practical capacities to grapple with AI, using the interpretive and qualitative approaches in which our disciplines excel.
--Rennie Mapp, Program Director of the DH Certificate

The new DH & AI program joins an active constellation of digital humanities work already underway at UVA, including the University Library's Digital Humanities Center, led by Faculty Director Lisa Blackmore. The DH ecosystem is a rich environment for events, workshops, and speaker visits, with a history at UVA that reaches back to the 1990s.