AI in Historical Perspectives

The general tenor of conversations around artificial intelligence (AI) leans toward novelty or rupture. Yet these sorts of “unprecedented” historical phenomenon are, very often, not unprecedented at all. Everything has a history, even AI, and historians are uniquely positioned to complicate these narratives of novelty.

The AHR calls for proposals for essays that frame AI not as a contemporary technology to be used or rejected but instead as a historical and historiographic phenomenon to be contextualized, interrogated, and reinterpreted. Our goal is to reframe AI within existing historiographies of labor, empire, economy, culture, science, and human agency, and in doing so, reshape our shared understanding of AI and its role in the discipline of history. By considering the contingencies and continuities of AI as a phenomenon of both continuity and disruption, we hope to provide an empirical basis on which historians who do not specialize in AI or histories of technology can build as we consider the ethical and moral boundaries of AI in historical research and teaching.

These essays (~5,000 words) will appear as a series in the AHR History Lab.

We welcome contributions that might include but are not limited to:

  • AI and Labor History: How do histories of work, mechanization, and worker resistance put AI in a broader historical context
  • AI and Industrial Modernity: How do we understand AI in light of histories of automation, standardization, and industrialization?
  • AI and the History of Knowledge: How might histories of classification, quantification, or bureaucracy illuminate the conceptual foundations of AI?
  • AI and Empire: What continuities link algorithmic reasoning to imperial knowledge systems, surveillance, and colonial governance?
  • AI and Cultural History: How does AI fit into shifting ideas of human intelligence, creativity, and consciousness?
  • AI and Media History: How does AI fit into other media-expansion phenomena, such as the invention of the book, the calculator, visual media like film and television, and audio innovation like radio and podcasting?
  • AI and Resistance: How might past resistance and protest movements—from the arts and crafts movement to citizen protests against environmental degradation—inform understandings of contemporary challenges to institutions that champion AI?

Submit a Proposal

Proposals should be submitted via our Google Form. Evaluations will take place on a rolling basis through December 30, 2026, with priority given to proposals submitted before June 30. Proposals should be no more than 500 words in length. They should provide a summary of the argument you will advance in your essay as well as address the following issues:

  • What time period(s), geographies, and historiographic trends anchor your essay?
  • Which elements of AI does your proposal address?
  • How will your essay support conversations about histories of AI outside of your chronological, geographic, and historiographical focuses?

A positive decision on your proposal does not guarantee publication in the journal; final essays will undergo peer review. Essays will be published serially in the AHR History Lab and will eventually be collected together on the AHR website.

Please contact series editor Kalani Craig (kcraig@illinois.edu) with questions.