Jennifer Devereaux
University of Southern California, Brain and Creativity Institute (BCI), Computational Social Science Laboratory
University of Edinburgh, Graduate School of History, Classics and Archaeology, Visiting Postgraduate Researcher
Proudly funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, I am a lecturer and postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University's Culture, Cognition, and Coevolution Lab, where I serve to navigate the intricate landscape of human emotion, cognitive theory, and the ethical dimensions of artificial intelligence.
In my research, I pursue two distinct yet interconnected lines of inquiry. First, I investigate the human needs met by AI and the historical ideas about human psychology and behavior that enable artificiality to play a significant role in our lives. This exploration delves into concepts of humanity that were present in the ancient Mediterranean and other regions, offering critical insights into the nature of technological advancements that rely on our human characteristics to function effectively.
Second, I integrate humanistic thought with advanced cognitive science, building upon my doctoral research to develop a philosophy of reading. This philosophy, grounded in theories of embodied cognition, emphasizes reader response. In a forthcoming article, I apply this framework to analyze intracultural intertextuality and the transmission of emotional content across cultural divides.
My interdisciplinary approach extends to my teaching. Drawing on my background in Classics, I have developed a popular Human Evolutionary Biology course that explores friendship from neuroendocrinology to cultural evolution and human-AI companionship. The course highlights the profound influence of social learning on the study and contemplation of human relationships and cooperative behaviors.
I use AI a lot in my teaching and research, which I also write about (stay tuned).
https://heb.fas.harvard.edu/people/jennifer-devereaux
https://coevolution.fas.harvard.edu/current-lab-members
https://classics.fas.harvard.edu/people/jennifer-devereaux
In my research, I pursue two distinct yet interconnected lines of inquiry. First, I investigate the human needs met by AI and the historical ideas about human psychology and behavior that enable artificiality to play a significant role in our lives. This exploration delves into concepts of humanity that were present in the ancient Mediterranean and other regions, offering critical insights into the nature of technological advancements that rely on our human characteristics to function effectively.
Second, I integrate humanistic thought with advanced cognitive science, building upon my doctoral research to develop a philosophy of reading. This philosophy, grounded in theories of embodied cognition, emphasizes reader response. In a forthcoming article, I apply this framework to analyze intracultural intertextuality and the transmission of emotional content across cultural divides.
My interdisciplinary approach extends to my teaching. Drawing on my background in Classics, I have developed a popular Human Evolutionary Biology course that explores friendship from neuroendocrinology to cultural evolution and human-AI companionship. The course highlights the profound influence of social learning on the study and contemplation of human relationships and cooperative behaviors.
I use AI a lot in my teaching and research, which I also write about (stay tuned).
https://heb.fas.harvard.edu/people/jennifer-devereaux
https://coevolution.fas.harvard.edu/current-lab-members
https://classics.fas.harvard.edu/people/jennifer-devereaux
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Topics covered in this wide-ranging collection include: cognitive linguistics applied to Homeric and early Greek texts, Roman cultural semantics, linguistic embodiment in Latin literature, group identities in Greek lyric, cognitive dissonance in historiography, kinesthetic empathy in Sappho, artificial intelligence in Hesiod and Greek drama, the enactivism of Roman statues and memory and art in the Roman Empire.
This ground-breaking work is the first to organize the field, allowing both scholars and students access to the methodologies, bibliographies and techniques of the cognitive sciences and how they have been applied to classics.
Book Chapters
Talks
Register Here:
https://brynmawr-edu.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0rdOmvrzoiHNMBO11W2pqDQvuvL1TlpHg2
Book Reviews
Conference Presentations
Postcritique writing has productively reinvigorated assessments of the type of activity the humanities perform. But this growing body of work has also exposed the need for a widespread re-evaluation that both includes and ranges beyond affective philosophies of attachment and strategies of surface reading. Amongst recent interrogations of critical practices, posited solutions have ranged across actor-network theory, ordinary language philosophy, attention to cognitive approaches to texts, new modes of interdisciplinarity, sociological, digital, and quantitative methods, and a reconsideration of the public functions of academic research. There is a critical momentum building behind the question of what kind of activity ‘criticism’ is, and how best to describe and understand the activities of the humanities more broadly. Attending to this question requires both innovation and a rigorous interrogation of the disparities, synchronies, and intersections of critique and postcritique. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick delicately articulated, a hermeneutics of suspicion can be ‘one kind of cognitive/affective theoretical practice among other, alternative kinds’. Is it possible that these various methods might offer each other mutual support, or coexist in a disciplinary structure that thrives upon critical variety? This conference seeks to explore the question: What are the assorted functions of our criticism?
or any other public gathering of a crowd, and with loud uproar censure some of the things that are said and done and approve others, both in excess, with full-throated clamor and clapping of hands, and thereto the rocks and the region round about re-echoing redouble the din of the
censure and the praise.” (Rep., VI, 492b-c, transl. J. Adams, 1969). A relationship of continuity, if not identity, is thus established between the theatre and other places of public gathering, and the “spectators” seem to behave in a comparable manner. This workshop proposes to focus on these multiple spectatorial practices in 5th-century Athens, in order to
better grasp the ways in which they accumulated, juxtaposed or compartmentalized various experiences acquired in multiple performance venues, in the broadest sense of the term.
In fact, theatergoers belonged to a variety of socio-cultural groups and subgroups (Roselli 2011; Robson 2016) and were confronted, in their public or private lives, with a variety of spectatorial practices and situations. As men (or women?), citizens and non-citizens, they importer their prior experience of performances into the theater. For example, free Athenian citizens – but perhaps also women (Budelmann & Power 2015) – possessed a common education and choral culture (Revermann 2006), and thus attended performances not as neophytes but as “insiders.” Athenian citizens, one might assume, also mobilized their political baggage as participants in the public life of their city. The characters of Aristophanes explicitly address the bouleutes, but the poet did not forget either the presence in the public of foreigners. Theater spectators were also actors and audience at the “judicial spectacle” given in the courts of the city (Villacèque 2013). They were also officiants or participants in religious rituals and festivals taking place in a public or private setting. They were fathers, brothers, uncles, sons, (and in the case of women, mothers and daughters), and received the spectacle as members of an oikos whose functions and affects were also socially determined.
Finally, it is assumed that they could also interpret the performance in light of their knowledge and practice of other art forms, especially visual arts (Hedreen 2007). In the theatre, poets can thus assign multiple “identities” or “roles” to spectators – two notions to be questioned – but we must also think about the ways in which the roles of “theater spectators”
could be summoned in other contexts than that of theatrical performance.
This symposium aims to reflect on these questions in a fresh way. It will take the form of a workshop with time slots planned for collective reflection on texts and methods, aiming
to bring out new critical strategies.
-- Department of Social and Political Sciences, University of Cyprus
Co-sponsors:
-- Department of Classics, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
-- Department of Classics and Philosophy, University of Cyprus
Conveners:
-- Kyriakos Demetriou (Cyprus)
-- Sophia Papaioannou (Athens)
-- Andreas Serafim (Cyprus/ OU Cyprus/ Trinity College Dublin)
Keynote speaker:
-- Michael Gagarin (Austin)
Confirmed speakers:
-- Adele Scafuro (Brown)
-- Alessandro Vatri (Oxford)
-- Andreas Hetzel (Hildesheim)
-- Andreas Michalopoulos (Athens)
-- Antonis Petrides (OU Cyprus)
-- Antonis Tsakmakis (Cyprus)
-- Benoit Sans (Brussels)
-- Brenda Griffith-Williams (UCL)
-- Christopher Carey (UCL)
-- Costas Apostolakis (Crete)
-- Dimos Spatharas (Crete)
-- Eleni Volonaki (Peloponnese)
-- Flaminia Beneventano della Corte (Siena)
-- Francesca Scrofani (EHESS/Università degli Studi di Trento)
-- Gabriel Danzig (Bar Ilan University)
-- Georgios Vassiliades (Paris IV-Sorbonne)
-- Jakob Wisse (Newcastle)
-- Jennifer Devereaux (Southern California)
-- Jessica Evans (Middlebury)
-- Jon Hesk (St Andrews)
-- Judith Mossman (Nottingham)
-- Kathryn Tempest (Roehampton)
-- Margot Neger (Salzburg)
-- Maria Kythreotou (Cyprus)
-- Michael Paschalis (Crete)
-- Rebecca van Hove (KCL)
-- Ricardo Gancz (Bar Ilan University)
-- Robert Sing (Cambridge)
-- Roger Brock (Leeds)
-- Sophia Xenophontos (Glasgow)
-- Stephen Todd (Manchester)
-- T. Davina McClain (Northwestern State University)
-- Tazuko Angela van Berkel (Leiden)
-- Thierry Hirsh (Oxford)
-- Tzu-I Liao (UCL)
-- Victoria Pagan (Florida)
Topics covered in this wide-ranging collection include: cognitive linguistics applied to Homeric and early Greek texts, Roman cultural semantics, linguistic embodiment in Latin literature, group identities in Greek lyric, cognitive dissonance in historiography, kinesthetic empathy in Sappho, artificial intelligence in Hesiod and Greek drama, the enactivism of Roman statues and memory and art in the Roman Empire.
This ground-breaking work is the first to organize the field, allowing both scholars and students access to the methodologies, bibliographies and techniques of the cognitive sciences and how they have been applied to classics.
Register Here:
https://brynmawr-edu.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0rdOmvrzoiHNMBO11W2pqDQvuvL1TlpHg2
Postcritique writing has productively reinvigorated assessments of the type of activity the humanities perform. But this growing body of work has also exposed the need for a widespread re-evaluation that both includes and ranges beyond affective philosophies of attachment and strategies of surface reading. Amongst recent interrogations of critical practices, posited solutions have ranged across actor-network theory, ordinary language philosophy, attention to cognitive approaches to texts, new modes of interdisciplinarity, sociological, digital, and quantitative methods, and a reconsideration of the public functions of academic research. There is a critical momentum building behind the question of what kind of activity ‘criticism’ is, and how best to describe and understand the activities of the humanities more broadly. Attending to this question requires both innovation and a rigorous interrogation of the disparities, synchronies, and intersections of critique and postcritique. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick delicately articulated, a hermeneutics of suspicion can be ‘one kind of cognitive/affective theoretical practice among other, alternative kinds’. Is it possible that these various methods might offer each other mutual support, or coexist in a disciplinary structure that thrives upon critical variety? This conference seeks to explore the question: What are the assorted functions of our criticism?
or any other public gathering of a crowd, and with loud uproar censure some of the things that are said and done and approve others, both in excess, with full-throated clamor and clapping of hands, and thereto the rocks and the region round about re-echoing redouble the din of the
censure and the praise.” (Rep., VI, 492b-c, transl. J. Adams, 1969). A relationship of continuity, if not identity, is thus established between the theatre and other places of public gathering, and the “spectators” seem to behave in a comparable manner. This workshop proposes to focus on these multiple spectatorial practices in 5th-century Athens, in order to
better grasp the ways in which they accumulated, juxtaposed or compartmentalized various experiences acquired in multiple performance venues, in the broadest sense of the term.
In fact, theatergoers belonged to a variety of socio-cultural groups and subgroups (Roselli 2011; Robson 2016) and were confronted, in their public or private lives, with a variety of spectatorial practices and situations. As men (or women?), citizens and non-citizens, they importer their prior experience of performances into the theater. For example, free Athenian citizens – but perhaps also women (Budelmann & Power 2015) – possessed a common education and choral culture (Revermann 2006), and thus attended performances not as neophytes but as “insiders.” Athenian citizens, one might assume, also mobilized their political baggage as participants in the public life of their city. The characters of Aristophanes explicitly address the bouleutes, but the poet did not forget either the presence in the public of foreigners. Theater spectators were also actors and audience at the “judicial spectacle” given in the courts of the city (Villacèque 2013). They were also officiants or participants in religious rituals and festivals taking place in a public or private setting. They were fathers, brothers, uncles, sons, (and in the case of women, mothers and daughters), and received the spectacle as members of an oikos whose functions and affects were also socially determined.
Finally, it is assumed that they could also interpret the performance in light of their knowledge and practice of other art forms, especially visual arts (Hedreen 2007). In the theatre, poets can thus assign multiple “identities” or “roles” to spectators – two notions to be questioned – but we must also think about the ways in which the roles of “theater spectators”
could be summoned in other contexts than that of theatrical performance.
This symposium aims to reflect on these questions in a fresh way. It will take the form of a workshop with time slots planned for collective reflection on texts and methods, aiming
to bring out new critical strategies.
-- Department of Social and Political Sciences, University of Cyprus
Co-sponsors:
-- Department of Classics, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
-- Department of Classics and Philosophy, University of Cyprus
Conveners:
-- Kyriakos Demetriou (Cyprus)
-- Sophia Papaioannou (Athens)
-- Andreas Serafim (Cyprus/ OU Cyprus/ Trinity College Dublin)
Keynote speaker:
-- Michael Gagarin (Austin)
Confirmed speakers:
-- Adele Scafuro (Brown)
-- Alessandro Vatri (Oxford)
-- Andreas Hetzel (Hildesheim)
-- Andreas Michalopoulos (Athens)
-- Antonis Petrides (OU Cyprus)
-- Antonis Tsakmakis (Cyprus)
-- Benoit Sans (Brussels)
-- Brenda Griffith-Williams (UCL)
-- Christopher Carey (UCL)
-- Costas Apostolakis (Crete)
-- Dimos Spatharas (Crete)
-- Eleni Volonaki (Peloponnese)
-- Flaminia Beneventano della Corte (Siena)
-- Francesca Scrofani (EHESS/Università degli Studi di Trento)
-- Gabriel Danzig (Bar Ilan University)
-- Georgios Vassiliades (Paris IV-Sorbonne)
-- Jakob Wisse (Newcastle)
-- Jennifer Devereaux (Southern California)
-- Jessica Evans (Middlebury)
-- Jon Hesk (St Andrews)
-- Judith Mossman (Nottingham)
-- Kathryn Tempest (Roehampton)
-- Margot Neger (Salzburg)
-- Maria Kythreotou (Cyprus)
-- Michael Paschalis (Crete)
-- Rebecca van Hove (KCL)
-- Ricardo Gancz (Bar Ilan University)
-- Robert Sing (Cambridge)
-- Roger Brock (Leeds)
-- Sophia Xenophontos (Glasgow)
-- Stephen Todd (Manchester)
-- T. Davina McClain (Northwestern State University)
-- Tazuko Angela van Berkel (Leiden)
-- Thierry Hirsh (Oxford)
-- Tzu-I Liao (UCL)
-- Victoria Pagan (Florida)