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California State University, Chico

Humanities Center

2025-2026 Theme: Retrospection

As the Humanities Center celebrates over 25 years as the interdisciplinary heart of the College of Humanities and Fine Arts, our theme for this year is Retrospection. When we pause to deeply consider the past – through history, art, storytelling, and film – we can recognize a lifetime’s worth of achievements, finally able to trace the full scope and development of a body of work. Sometimes, our look back requires us to reevaluate what we thought we understood about the past. What has been left out? What has been misunderstood? What wasn’t clear in the moment that emerges with the passage of time? We must reckon with how we remember in the present because it will impact our future. The Humanities Center’s purpose is to create and nurture a culture of ideas at Chico State and to engage our diverse intellectual community through public events. During the 2025-26 year, the Humanities Center will host a series of lectures and films that grapple with our relationship to and understanding of the past.

2025 Events

Digital Humanities Series
Greg Cootsona

An AI Digital Humanities Manifesto

Tuesday, December 2, 2025 | 5:00 p.m., ZOOM

Greg Cootsona

Greg Cootsona will present a balanced exploration of artificial intelligence that avoids both techno-utopianism and technophobia. Drawing on multiple religious traditions, this talk examines AI through the lens of responsible engagement. It addresses human flourishing and the need to shape AI’s development toward justice and the common good.

Greg Cootsona is a lecturer at California State University, Chico and executive director of AI and Faith. He has authored eight books including Science and Religions in America (Routledge, 2023) and has directed millions of dollars in grant projects designed to connect science and religion. He holds a Ph.D. in theology and the philosophy of religion from Berkeley's Graduate Theological Union. He has appeared in various outlets such as the Today Show, CNN, National Public Radio, and the New York Times.

Works in Progress
Elizabeth Davis

Theatre Faculty
Eco-Friendly Dyeing Techniques in Theatre

Friday, December 5 at 12:00 p.m., PAC 113

Elizabeth Davis head shot

This presentation explores the integration of environmentally friendly dye techniques in theatrical design, highlighting their use in the Department of Music, Theatre and Dance’s November production of A Year with Frog and Toad. Focusing on eco-printing and eco-dyeing methods, the session will demonstrate how natural, sustainable processes can replace traditional fabric treatments. Attendees will gain insight into creative applications that reduce environmental impact while enhancing visual storytelling through organic textures and colors.

Digital Humanities Series
Oleksiy Al-saadi

Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science 
What is Computation?: The Philosophy of Turing Machines

Wednesday March 4, 2026 | 5:00 p.m.-6:00 p.m. on ZOOM

Oleksiy Al-saadi

In the 1930s, Alan Turing and Alonzo Church introduced a minimal model of computation that, in terms of expressive power, is able to compute anything a modern-day computer can. Church's statement, "There is no algorithm unless it can be computed by such a machine" has formed the basis to how we can even understand what problems can be computed. In this talk, we expound on the digital of "Digital Humanities". We discuss types of Turing Machines and their ability to model human solvability of certain games. Then, we discuss why, despite the universal acceptance of the Church-Turing thesis, it has never actually been proven.
Dr. Al-Saadi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Chico State, where he also did his B.A. before receiving a Ph.D from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln on distance and domination properties in graph theory. His work focuses on theoretical computer science and the study of finding faster, algorithmic solutions to challenging problems under certain restrictions. He also has great interest in reductions, a way of showing that one hard problem is really another hard problem in disguise.