The Sam Barnes Lecture: Political Culture in the Age of AI

Join the BMW Center for German and European Studies for the inaugural Samuel Barnes Lecture with Henry Farrell. The event will take place in the Mortara Center Boardroom from 12-1:30pm. Lunch will be provided. The event will offer a virtual option, which you will be sent after you register. Please designate in the registration if you plan to attend virtually.

Throughout his career, Samuel Barnes was fascinated by political culture. Which beliefs and values did people share? How did they acquire those beliefs and values, and how did they shape political behavior? Today, the processes through which beliefs and values are transmitted and expressed are being reshaped by new technologies, including Large Language Models. This raises a multitude of new questions about the means of cultural production, the transmission of bias, the possibility of generating new ideas, and the likelihood of repeating old cultural patterns. The lecture will explore how these technologies are reshaping culture, generating new political questions and controversies.

Henry Farrell is SNF Agora Institute Professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and 2019 winner of the Friedrich Schiedel Prize for Politics and Technology. He has previously been a professor at George Washington University and the University of Toronto, a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, and a senior research fellow at the Max-Planck Project Group in Bonn, Germany. He works on a variety of topics, including democracy, the politics of the Internet and international and comparative political economy. His first book, The Political Economy of Trust: Interests, Institutions and Inter-Firm Cooperation, was published in 2008 by Cambridge University Press. His second (with Abraham Newman) Of Privacy and Power: The Transatlantic Fight over Freedom and Security, was published in 2019 by Princeton University Press, and has been awarded the 2019 Chicago-Kent College of Law / Roy C. Palmer Civil Liberties Prize and the ISA-ICOMM Best Book Award. Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy (with Abraham Newman), is forthcoming from Henry Holt (US) and Penguin (UK). In addition he has authored or co-authored 34 academic articles, as well as an edited volume, and several book chapters for edited volumes.

He is a co-founder of the popular academic blog Crooked Timber, and from 2019-2022 was Editor-in-Chief of The Monkey Cage, a political science blog hosted at the Washington Post, which previously won the 2010 The Week award for Best Blog. He has written articles for publications including Foreign Affairs, The New York Times, The Financial Times, Foreign Policy, Democracy, The American Prospect, The Washington Monthly, The Boston Review, The American Interest, Aeon, New Scientist, The Nation, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Times Higher Education, and the Australian Academic Supplement among others. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, an international correspondent for Stato e Mercato, co-chair of the Social Science Research Council’s Digital Culture initiative, and an affiliated scholar at Stanford University Law School’s Center for the Internet and Society.

This event is co-sponsored with the Mortara Center for International Studies.