Maria Dikcis

Dr. Maria Dikcis is a researcher and educator working at the intersection of literary studies, artificial intelligence, and critical race and ethnic studies. She is currently an American Council of Learned Societies Leading Edge Fellow and serves as Lead Researcher & Editor for the AI Pedagogy Project, as well as a Research Collaborator with the Data Nutrition Project. She previously held positions as a Postdoctoral College Fellow in the Department of English at Harvard University, a Researcher with metaLAB (at) Harvard, and a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Chicago’s Pozen Family Center for Human Rights. Her work brings humanities-based approaches to questions of technology, with a focus on how race, media, and cultural production shape, and are shaped by, data-driven systems.

Maria earned her PhD in English from Northwestern University, where her dissertation examining the media ecologies of multiethnic American poetry after 1965 won the Jean H. Hagstrum Prize for best dissertation of the year. Her research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and her scholarship can be found in ASAP/Journal, Public Books, The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry and Politics Since 1900, and Chicago Review, among other venues.

Committed to expanding access to the humanities, Maria has taught in both university and public-facing contexts, including programs serving incarcerated and low-income adult learners. Across her work, she combines rigorous scholarship with pedagogical leadership, contributing to collaborative projects that make complex ideas about AI, literature, and culture accessible to broader publics.