Graham Burnett on AI & The Attention Liberation Movement - Dean's Speaker Series
The School of Liberal Arts Dean's Speaker Series presents D. Graham Burnett, Henry Charles Lea Professor of History and History of Science at Princeton University and co-editor of Attensity! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement (Crown, 2026), for a discussion on AI and attention. "We all feel it: something is seriously wrong. Our attention—that essential ability to give our minds and senses to the world—is being trapped, gutted, and sold out from under us by an industry of immense technological and financial power. The heedless exploitation of this vital capacity by a handful of tech companies is harming us all, reducing our very selfhood to that which can be quantified, bought, and sold—and shaking the foundations of our democracy." - Book description of Attensity! published by Penguin Random House.
After Burnett’s remarks, Dean of the School of Liberal Arts Brian T. Edwards will lead a conversation with Burnett and the audience on this topic of AI, technology, and attention.
D. Graham Burnett is the Henry Charles Lea Professor of History and History of Science at Princeton University, and the director of the Strother School of Radical Attention (in Brooklyn). Born in France, Burnett trained at Cambridge University (Trinity College), and has taught at Yale, Columbia, and the New School (NYC). He is the author of a number of scholarly books on nature, politics, and technology from the seventeenth to the twentieth century, including Masters of All They Surveyed (Chicago, 2000), Descartes and the Hyperbolic Quest (American Philosophical Society, 2005), Trying Leviathan(Princeton, 2007) and The Sounding of the Whale (2012). He has a longstanding association with the speculative research collective ESTAR(SER), with whom he created the 2021 metafiction In Search of the Third Bird (Strange Attractor / MIT, 2021). He is an editor at Cabinet magazine (Berlin), and a Guggenheim fellow, and he was a visiting artist at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki in 2023. His latest co-authored, co-edited book is Attensity! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement (Penguin, 2026).
Brian T. Edwards is Dean of the School of Liberal Arts and the Herb Weil, PhD Professor of the Humanities, where since 2018 he has led the largest of Tulane’s nine schools, encompassing 35 departments and programs in the social sciences, humanities, area studies, fine and performing arts. Prior to moving to New Orleans, he was on the faculty of Northwestern University, where he was the Crown Professor in Middle East Studies and the founding director of the Program in Middle East and North African Studies. As a scholar, Edwards examines the ways that the global circulation of goods, ideas, and cultural products impacts politics. with a particular focus on North Africa and the Middle East, where he has done extensive field research. He is the author or editor of four books, most recently After the American Century: The Ends of U.S. Culture in the Middle East (Columbia Univ. Press), as well as numerous essays, articles, and Op Eds in a wide range of publications both scholarly and mainstream. In 2020, he launched a project on global port cities, which links researchers, urbanists, artists, and community activists in New Orleans, Tangier (Morocco), Dakar (Senegal), Ho Chi Minh City (Vietnam), Salvador (Brazil), Marseille, and others.
The School of Liberal Arts Dean’s Speaker Series brings prominent scholars, writers, and practitioners in the humanities, fine & performing arts and social sciences to Tulane University to foster an ongoing conversation about the vitality of the liberal arts in addressing topics that matter to society.
This talk takes place in Freeman Auditorium (Room #205) in Woldenberg Art Center.
