Forum

The Dwight H. Terry Forum 2026

Featuring Ted Chiang, award-winning writer of science fiction, including the short story collections Stories of Your Life and Others and Exhalation.

“The Incompatibilities Between Generative AI and Art”

Thursday, October 8, 2026 at 4:00 p.m.

Location: Kline 14, 14th floor, Kline Tower, 219 Prospect Street, New Haven

This event is free and open to the public, with a reception to follow.

This map shows the location on Yale’s Science Hill.

About the Speaker

Ted Chiang is an award-winning writer of science fiction. Over the course of thirty-five years, Chiang has written two short story collections (Stories of Your Life and Others and Exhalation), along with countless other short stories and op-eds for publications such as The New York Times and The New Yorker. A freelance technical writer who resides in Washington state, Chiang is a graduate of the Clarion Writers Workshop.

Past Dwight H. Terry Forums

2025

2025 Yale Dwight H. Terry Forum: The Question Concerning AI

Friday, March 28 2025 at 4:00 p.m. | Kline 14

Is AI as revolutionary as fire in changing the world?  Or is that hype?  But can it be hype when AI has such obvious benefits in some research fields? How can we leverage the astonishing potential of AI in a rational, practical and responsible way?  Is AI a moral panic, a sales job, a generational opportunity, a threat of apocalypse?  How can we think clearly and deeply about a topic that is so obscured by glitz, money, and noise?  How can we as scholars at Yale collectively understand AI in our academic setting, and how should our research and teaching respond to advances in AI? These are some of the questions this panel will seek to answer, or at least explore at the Forum.

Panelists

Lisa Messeri, Associate Professor of Anthropology  
Brandon Ogbuno, Assistant Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology  
John Durham Peters, Maria Rosa Menocal Professor of English and of Film and Media Studies
Joanna Radin, Associate Professor of History of Medicine and History  

Moderator

Priyamvada Natarajan, Joseph S. and Sophia S. Fruton Professor of Astronomy and Professor of Physics; Director of the Franke Program in Science and the Humanities

2024

2024 Yale Dwight H. Terry Forum: The Place of the Liberal Arts in a Changing Climate

2022

Charmaine Royal, Robert O. Keohane Professor of African & African American Studies, Biology, Global Health, and Family Medicine & Community Health, Duke University

2020

Terry Forum on the Ethics of Displaying the Material Cultures of Knowledge Production

The first Terry Foum took the renovation of the Peabody Museum as an occasion to think across disciplines about the future of museum displays about “science” and “natural history.” Members of the Peabody community have been addressing difficult questions about the meanings of these categories in the twenty-first century. What is natural history the history of? Is science a culturally specific mode of knowledge production, or a form of engagement with the natural world common to many different cultures? An unusual feature of the renovated Peabody will be its History of Science & Technology gallery, displaying technological devices and scientific instruments made primarily in Europe and North America from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, most of which were used in Yale’s science labs. The History of Science & Technology gallery will be adjacent to other galleries dedicated to collections associated with Ancient Egypt, Babylonia, Mesoamerica, and Native American cultures. How might recent scholarship in Indigenous Studies and Museum Studies inform the display of these objects in a way that unsettles the long and oppressive history of dividing cultures with science from those without?

Elizabeth Hoover (UC Berkeley, Environmental Science, Policy & Management) gave an introductory presentation, bringing her expertise in Indigenous Studies, Museum Studies, and Environmental Anthropology, plus recent experience as a consultant for Chicago’s Field Museum. Paola Bertucci, Curator of the Peabody’s History of Science & Technology Collection, described the design process for the renovated gallery. The conversation was moderated by Joanna Radin (Yale, History of Science, Medicine, and Public Health) and Chitra Ramalingam (Yale Center for British Art).