Adam C. Andrews is an independent scholar whose work sits where the humanities meet artificial intelligence.
MA, Anthropology — University of Iowa
MA, Folklore — University of Oregon
BA, English — University of Iowa
He was trained in folklore and anthropology — including ethnographic fieldwork — with graduate study in rhetoric, semiotics, and continental theories of agency. Over nineteen years at a public university he taught rhetoric and college writing, and from 2010 onward built an overlapping and steadily expanding career in learning assessment: first for the writing program, then across the whole institution as its campus assessment coordinator, designing survey instruments, evaluation rubrics, and the disaggregated analyses used to identify where programs were succeeding and where specific groups of students were being underserved.
His current work brings that lineage to bear on how language models construct meaning and represent agency. He is interested in the point his own field has long understood: that theories of mind constituted through language originated in the humanities and social sciences, where their implications have been most thoroughly tested. He finds that tradition has a good deal to say to the AI conversation — sometimes confirming, in different vocabulary, what the field has already arrived at, and occasionally naming why something is right that had only been observed to work.
Adam C. Andrews 