Maria Dikcis

Dr. Maria Dikcis is a College Fellow in the Department of English at Harvard University. She holds a PhD in English with a Graduate Certificate in Critical Theory from Northwestern University. Before coming to Harvard, she was an American Council of Learned Societies Emerging Voices Fellow at the University of Chicago, where she served as a Mass Incarceration and Policing Fellow at the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights and co-directed a Justice, Politics, and Culture Think Tank with the Prison + Neighborhood Arts Project.

Maria is an interdisciplinary scholar of literature, media, and race with research and teaching interests in contemporary American poetry, critical race and ethnic studies, media archeology, artificial intelligence, and critical data studies. Her current book project—a multimodal monograph with interactive, born-digital elements—traces a comparative literary history examining how African American, Asian American, and Latinx authors have used a range of print, audio, broadcast, and digital technologies to innovate new forms of racial representation and political critique throughout the post-1965 era. Her writing can be found in ASAP/Journal, Chicago Review, and The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry and Politics Since 1900.

During the 2023-24 academic year, Maria is teaching two courses at Harvard that foreground humanistic approaches to the fields of AI and data science: “Race in the Age of Artificial Intelligence” and “The Dark Side of Big Data.” She is particularly interested in exploring how educators can integrate AI tools into the classroom in responsible, creative, and generative ways.