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The Synthetic Humanities?
The Digital Conference 2026, King's College London. Bush House Arcade.
The talk asks whether generative AI requires a new term for humanities method after digital humanities, and whether that rebranding also belongs to the institutional theater of making humanities work sound fundable, flashy, and new.
Biography
Doug Stark is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Texas at Arlington. His research and teaching move between film and media studies, game and play studies, science and technology studies, and critical theory.
His work asks how play has helped people adapt to social and technical change from the Industrial Revolution to the information age. Rather than treating games as a separate sphere of entertainment, he studies play as a practical media form: a way of training bodies, organizing conduct, modeling problems, and making technical systems easier to inhabit.
His current book project, Untimely Play: History, Habit, Games, retrieves neglected game critics and game-like practices to rethink the relationship between play and power. Its archive moves from colonial cricket, military training, workplace roleplay, and game theory to video games, gamification, and contemporary AI.
Stark also builds and teaches with games. His courses introduce students to close play, game analysis, critical theory, digital media, and esports, while his design work uses prototypes and research infrastructure to make technical mediation visible as something people can test, revise, and argue with.