Welcome to “Critical AI Studies,” offered in Fall 2025 through the Ph.D. Program in English and M.A. in Digital Humanities Program at CUNY Graduate Center. Here is our course description: AI is everywhere and nowhere, a harbinger of techno-utopian promise and automated machinic doom. This course takes a critical, creative, practical, and epistemological approach to the cluster of technologies known as “AI,” exploring how AI functions in practice, what its promise and limitations might be, and how it acts as an imaginary through which political, social, and economic forces are being mustered. Working primarily with language-based AI systems, we will begin by seeking to understand what large language models are…