Call for Papers: ‘AI Literacy for the Ancient World’
Second Meeting of the iGAIAS Network
1-3 July 2026 – Department of Classics, University of Reading, United Kingdom
This meeting aims to bring together teachers, researchers, and practitioners in ancient world studies, broadly conceived, to address the issues related to the use and integration of artificial intelligence (AI) tools across our disciplines. We are aware that the use of AI models is increasing exponentially across all areas of daily life, but recognition and understanding of the issues related to AI models is not increasing at the same rate. This meeting will focus on how best to promote AI literacy and current AI ethics issues among those in our educational and work contexts.
The first day of the meeting will host a series of hands-on workshop sessions to demonstrate methods for ethically using AI tools for supporting ancient world teaching, learning, and research. We invite proposals for workshop sessions to add to the current list of activities, which currently includes:
- Hands-on AI tool sandbox sessions, including Wayground, immersive technologies, and personalized LLMs
- Applications for AI tools in poor internet connection environments
- AI as a research collaborator
- AI and assessment
- AI for humanities graduates in the workplace
- A discussion session to improve two educational toolkits: one on AI ethics and the presentation of the ancient world in AI-generated images, and one on ethical AI methods for teachers and students of ancient languages.
The second and third days of the meeting will be a series of networking events and discussion sessions focusing on current ethical issues surrounding AI use in ancient world studies. The proposed discussion themes include, but are not limited to:
- How do we best educate students about AI ethics across educational levels, and how do we make this engagement accessible to people who have no desire to directly interact with AI models?
- How do we develop ethical, sustainable, and accessible training materials for using AI models to support teaching and learning?
- How do we address the issues that AI summarization pose for the preservation of history, including persistent omission and cultural context?
- How do agentic AI models use the ancient world in their reasoning? Does AI reception of the ancient world reflect human receptions or is this a new form of reception entirely?
We invite proposals for 30-minute workshop sessions, consisting of a 100-word abstract and a short description of the proposed sandpit activity. We also invite proposals for 20-minute conference papers, consisting of a 300-word abstract. All submissions should include a 50-word short biography and a CV for each presenter. Please send proposals to iGAIAS2026@reading.ac.uk by 24 April 2026.
We also intend to publish the proceedings of this conference in The Classics Journal shortly after the conference to ensure we can disseminate the outcomes of the event as quickly as possible in our rapidly developing technological environment. If you are unable to participate in the conference and would still like to submit your work for publication, please submit your 300-word abstract and CV to iGAIAS2026@reading.ac.uk by 10 July 2026.
Note: this is not a Classical Association event – please contact the organisers directly with any enquiries.