The CEAH and the Student Innovation Center will be co-hosting a roundtable lecture and discussion entitled “Making Meaning with AI: A Conversation with Digital Humanist Ryan Cordell.” Featuring Dr. Ryan Cordell (Associate Professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) alongside faculty makers and innovators, this conversation will explore hands-on approaches to creative work in various disciplines, practical ways to incorporate AI tools, opportunities for student engagement in AI-enabled making, and exciting possibilities for the future of creative practice. Whether you’re interested in letterpress printing, digital arts, music, or other creative domains, you’ll discover new ways to engage with both traditional and emerging tools.

The roundtable will be held on Thursday, April 10^th from 10:00am-11:30am at the Launchpad Room (SICTR 4250).  

Learn more about the speakers below.  

Ryan Cordell (Associate Professor of English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) 

Ryan Cordell is Associate Professor in the School of Information Sciences and Department of English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Cordell primarily studies circulation and reprinting in nineteenth-century American newspapers, but his interests extend to the influence of computation, digitization, and machine learning on contemporary reading, writing, and research. Cordell collaborates with colleagues across disciplines on the Viral Texts project (https://viraltexts.org), which uses robust data mining tools to discover borrowed texts across large-scale archives of nineteenth-century periodicals. In 2020, Cordell published a whitepaper for the Library of Congress about the present and future of machine learning methods for libraries. Cordell holds an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship at the Freie University Berlin, serves as a Senior Fellow in the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Critical Bibliography at the Rare Book School, and also directs UIUC’s Skeuomorph Press & BookLab (https://skeuomorph.ischool.illinois.edu). 

Abram Anders (Professor of Innovation at Iowa State) 

Dr. Abram Anders is the Jonathan Wickert Professor of Innovation and Associate Director of the Student Innovation Center at Iowa State University. His research focuses on the intersection of technology, communication, and pedagogy. Dr. Anders has published research on innovative teaching practices and the integration of AI in education, emphasizing writing instruction and creative processes. 

Eric York (Associate Professor of English at Iowa State) 

Eric J. York is Associate Professor of English in Artificial Intelligence and Writing, at Iowa State University of Science and Technology. He studies AI and other emerging technologies in the context of technical and professional communication and writes about rhetoric, technology, and pedagogy. He teaches courses in rhetoric, UX design, and web development and is also a practicing full stack web developer. 

Johnny Diblasi (Assistant Professor of Art and Visual Culture at Iowa State) 

Johnny DiBlasi is an interdisciplinary researcher and artist whose practice sits at the intersection of art, science, and technology and that explores a range processes and interests. Through this creative practice, DiBlasi works with computational media, bio-data, digital networks, and artificial intelligence to create interactive installations that fuse site specific data structures into a physical architecture. Through various works, he explores the aesthetic possibilities of data gathered in real time and how these aesthetic experiences can connect an audience to the pulse of the landscape in which they coexist. His works address timely topics in areas such as generative deep learning, cybernetics, phenomenology, human-computer interaction, and bio creation / data. DiBlasi exhibits his works and installations nationally and internationally at venues such as the International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA) and SIGGRAPH, and he was awarded a Fulbright US Scholar Award for his research and creative project conducted at the Museums Quartier in Vienna.  

DiBlasi is Assistant Professor of in the Department of Art and Visual Culture at Iowa State University. He earned an MFA from the Photographic and Electronic Media program at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, MD. Prior to that he received a BFA in Photography and Digital Media, Magna Cum Laude, from the University of Houston. DiBlasi teaches studio courses in creative AI, video, web design, creative coding, and interactive media. He is a founding member of the arts research group [phylum] which brings together other artists and researchers working at the intersection of science and technology. In addition to teaching, DiBlasi has experience working in the creative industry as a photographer and web designer. (http://johnnydiblasi.com/) 

Raluca Iancu (Assistant Professor of Art and Visual Culture at Iowa State) 

Raluca Iancu is currently an Assistant Professor in Art & Visual Culture, Printmaking, at Iowa State University (ISU). She earned her MFA in Studio Art, Printmaking, from The University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK), and her BFA in Printmaking from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University, Halifax, Nova Scotia. 

Recent awards include a 2025 Art Project grant from the Iowa Art Council, a 2024 Bridging the Gap Interdisciplinary Grant (ISU), a 2024 Polster Teaching Award from the College of Design (ISU), a 2022 Early Achievement in Teaching Award (ISU), and she was selected as one of four 2022-2024 ISU College of Design Innovation & Entrepreneurship Scholars. 

Her work investigates disaster, memory, and vulnerability through different media, ranging from printmaking to performance, to edible art and printed objects. She is interested in how our relationship with technology can simultaneously enhance our lives, while it can also leave us vulnerable. 

She has exhibited internationally, at venues including the Art Museum of Cluj-Napoca (Romania), and the CICA Museum (Korea); and in the United States at the International Print Center of New York (NY), the Bradbury Art Museum, (AR), the Art Institute of Boston (MA), and the Hunterdon Museum (NJ), among others. She has been an artist in residence in the United States, at the Hambidge Center for Creative Arts & Sciences (GA) and the Vermont Studio Center (VT), among others; and internationally Art Print Residence (Spain), the Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Fine Arts (Poland), St Michael’s Printshop (Canada), Studio Kura (Japan), BetterPress Lab (Italy), and, most recently, MI-LAB (Japan). 

Ritwik Banerji (Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Iowa State) 

Ritwik Banerji is an experimental ethnographer, interactive media artist, and improviser. Having completed his PhD in music and new media at the University of California, Berkeley, he is currently Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Iowa State University. His research focuses on the development of artificial intelligence as a multimodal ethnographic medium and subjecting AI systems to the critique of human practitioners in order to elicit their commentary on the performance of humanness. His writings appear in Anthropology in Action, Jazz Perspectives, Jazz and Culture, The Oxford Handbook of the Phenomenology of Music Cultures, New Directions in 3rd Wave Human-Computer Interaction, and Proceedings of the International Computer Music Conference. Banerji is currently working on an ethnographic monograph on the relationship between freedom and knowledge in the practice of free improvisation based on fieldwork conducted over several years in Berlin, Chicago, and the San Francisco Bay Area, and supported by the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies, the Fulbright U.S. Young Journalist’s Fellowship (Germany), and the Berkeley Center for New Media. In addition to numerous conference presentations, Banerji has also presented his work at guest lectures at several universities, including Columbia, Princeton, UC San Diego and Irvine, Stanford, University of Chicago, and Kunstuniversität Graz. As an artist, Banerji has presented his work through live performance and interactive installation at the Planetarium of the Federal University of Bahia in Brazil, Elastic Arts (Chicago, Experimental Intermedia (New York), and Ausland (Berlin), among other venues. Creative collaborators include Theresa Wong, Liz Allbee, Tritha Sinha, Tony Malaby, Hamilton Berry, and Joel Grip.