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The University of Chicago Divinity School is pleased to announce the 2026 Nuveen Lecture, funded by the Baptist Theological Union, to be delivered by Patrick Jagoda, William Rainey Harper Professor in the Departments of English Language and Literature, Cinema and Media Studies, and Obstetrics and Gynecology, and the College, at the University of Chicago. The lecture, titled “Nonhuman Creation: Approaching AI Art through Apophatic Aesthetics, Nonconscious Experiments, and Alien Imaginaries,” will take place on Thursday, October 22, 2026, from 5 p.m. CT in the third-floor lecture hall in Swift Hall. A reception will follow in the Swift Hall Common Room.

Jagoda’s lecture examines contemporary artistic experiments with generative artificial intelligence (AI) through two earlier lineages. The first is apophatic aesthetics, a mode of engagement with divinity through absence and the limits of human expression drawn from negative theology. The second is the modernist, surrealist, and Dada experiments with text and image that depended on nonconscious cognition and algorithmic process. Building on both, Jagoda will ask whether generative AI can replenish or meaningfully transform contemporary art, from literature to moving images to interactive games. 

“I’m honored to be part of the Nuveen Lecture series,” Jagoda said. “Negative theology taught us to attend carefully to where our categories break down. I want to borrow that habit of thought as a way into contemporary questions of what it means to make art as, with, against, and for generative AI. I don’t think about LLMs in mystical terms, and there is plenty to critique in generative AI, but I also want to take seriously how this technological paradigm helps us think anew about art, creativity, and both human and nonhuman thinking.”

The lecture proposes several ways of describing art’s relationship to AI, composed as, with, against, and for the technology. Jagoda will focus on how “critical making” techniques can contribute to critical AI studies in the humanities and arts, and what the exercise reveals about the developing field of speculative design.

“Theologians have an old habit: they describe divinity by what escapes our terms, not by what fits them,” said James T. Robinson, dean and Nathan Cummings Professor at the Divinity School. “Professor Jagoda asks what that habit still has to teach us about generative art, examining it closely rather than praising or dismissing it outright, an approach very much at home in a school built to study how humans reach for what exceeds them.”

Register to attend the lecture on October 22. 

About the Nuveen Lecture

The John Nuveen Lecture was established in 1972 by the Trustees of the Baptist Theological Union, which oversees an endowment that helps to support the University of Chicago Divinity School. Each year, the Divinity School invites a prominent member of the University’s faculty to deliver the lecture.