The Studio for Literary Technology

Where Writers Meet the Machine

The Studio for Literary Technology, launched in the English Department in fall 2025, is where UMD students and faculty engage large language models, generative AI, and computational narrative as literary material — not tools to adopt uncritically or threats to resist outright, but systems worth meeting on their own terms.

Technologists are building tools that reshape how text gets generated, published, and read—largely without writers or humanists in the room. The Studio aims to remedy this in part by bringing writers and technologists together. Students who attend Studio programming leave with a critical vocabulary for evaluating AI writing tools rather than either fearing or blindly adopting them, and — in hands-on workshops — direct experience building with the technology itself: fine-tuning language models, designing generative systems, and treating the resulting texts as material for genuine literary and ethical scrutiny. Faculty leave with classroom-ready examples of writers critically engaging LLMs and generative technologies as sites of inquiry and criticism — heuristics for reading generated text, and frameworks for treating the model itself as a medium worth studying in its own right.

The Studio is directed by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, poet and Director of the MFA in Creative Writing.

Get Involved

The Studio's programming is open to the UMD community — no registration or background in AI required. The best way to engage is simple: show up.

Attend an event. Talks and workshops are free and open to students and faculty across campus, not just English. Check the this page and the Instagram to see what’s coming up next.

Connect. If you teach a course where AI, generative text, or digital literacy is relevant, the Studio’s programming can be a natural fit for a class visit or assigned event — reach out to Lillian-Yvonne Bertram if you’d like them to visit a class or plan an event.

Stay in the loop. Follow the Instagram for updates!

Ways to Meet AI

The Studio runs Ways to Meet AI, an interdisciplinary speaker and workshop series bringing writers, artists, and scholars to campus for talks, conversations, and hands-on workshops on how AI is reshaping creativity, literature, culture, and society. Past guests include Sasha Stiles, Hannes Bajohr, Vauhini Vara, and Halim Madi, in partnership with campus units including the AI Interdisciplinary Institute at Maryland, BCaT (Black Communication & Technology Lab), MITH, and Arts for All.

Lear more about past events.