AI@SACoLM

Researchers of the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Yale University, 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 focus on a highly relevant topic:

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.

To establish a long-term institutional collaboration, AI@SACoLM acquired a Global Champion Fund from the University of Zurich. The fund was returned in 2026 for personal reasons relating to the two PIs.

Principal Investigators: Fatima Naqvi  & Frauke Berndt