Where Artificial intelligence and fiction meet

The Jackman Humanities Institute invites you to the 2026 Wiegand Memorial Foundation Lecture “Where Artificial Intelligence and Fiction Meet” and reception on Monday, February 23, 2026, with Teresa Heffernan, Professor of English at Saint Mary’s University, Halifax. The lecture will be moderated by Maurits van Bever Donker, Director of the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape.

From Alan Turing and Samuel Butler to Peter Thiel and J.R.R. Tolkien to Demis Hassabis and Douglas Adams to Elon Musk and Gene Roddenberry, the fiction and science of artificial intelligence have long been entangled and conflated in the cultural imaginary. Obscuring the important social, political, and ethical questions these technologies raise, the AI industry co-opts fiction only to marginalize the literary imagination in discussions of a technological future. What are the costs of collapsing animals with machines? Of turning language into numbers? And why is this field steeped in orphic language? As the AI industry re-shapes knowledge, this talk considers what gets lost when the centuries old study of human society and culture is swallowed up by a very different type of knowledge generated algorithms, linear algebra, and statistics and why it is imperative to keep the tension between computation and languages alive.

Speaker and moderator

Teresa Heffernan

Teresa Heffernan is Professor of English at Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, NS. Her current research is on the science and fiction of robotics and AI. She has held fellowships at JHI, the University of Toronto; CAPAS, the University of Heidelberg; and the AI Lab at the Centre of Ethics, University of Toronto. Her books include: the edited collection Cyborg Futures: Cross-disciplinary Perspectives on Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Palgrave (2019); Veiled Figures: Women, Modernity, and the Spectres of Orientalism (2016); and Post-Apocalyptic Culture: Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Twentieth-Century Novel (2008). Her articles have appeared in journals such as AI & Society, Studies in the Novel, Eighteenth-Century Studies, Cultural Critique, Cultural Studies, Arab Journal for the Humanities, Framework: Journal of Cinema and Media, Canadian Literature, Twentieth Century Literature, and English Studies in Africa. She runs the website Social Robot Futures.

Maurits van Bever Donker

Maurits van Bever Donker is Director of the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape and a Board Member of the Consortium for Humanities Centres and Institutes. His research specialisation is in Black Consciousness Philosophy and Négritude, and examines the modes through which these global postcolonial and decolonial discourses re-script our understandings of political philosophy and the world. He also researches and teaches across Postcolonial Theory and Aesthetics, African Philosophy and Literatures, and Contemporary South African and African History. His monograph, Texturing Difference is located at the intersection of postcolonial and critical theory, literature and philosophy. Maurits’s first book, Remains of the Social, edited with Ross Truscott, Premesh Lalu and Gary Minkley, engages with what “the social” might mean after apartheid. He has edited several journal special issues on topics including “The mind of apartheid,” “Transformative Constitutionalism and the Human,” and the “Idea of the University in Africa,” and serves as editor-in-chief for the international peer-reviewed journal Afrika Focus.

Registration

Register for the event on the official event page.