�����’s texts and technology program has received a 2026 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to launch “Building a Digital Humanities Generative AI Learning Community,” a 24-month initiative designed to help faculty and graduate students thoughtfully integrate AI into humanities teaching.

This year, ��AV is leading one of only 84 projects funded by the NEH and is the only institution in Florida to be selected for the award.

Associate Professor and Professor will lead the initiative, which focuses on interdisciplinary collaboration, curriculum redesign and hands-on experimentation with emerging AI tools.

Coding for Creativity

Salter, director of graduate programs in the College of Arts and Humanities, says the project builds on a long tradition in digital humanities of teaching creative problem-solving through technology.

“In a lot of humanities programs, when we teach people how to build digital projects, we’re teaching them some level of code,” Salter says. “But often we’re working with low-code tools — interfaces designed for a specific purpose, like building a certain kind of game. Once students learn how to navigate those tools, what really matters is their ideas, the design, the story they want to tell.”

She explains that generative AI tools function in a similar way. Rather than replacing creativity, they can expand it.

“When we look at agentic AI, it’s essentially a low-code computational interface,” Salter says. “The better you can define and plan a concept, the more the system can assist with the underlying technical work — especially in the creative applications.”

Reimagining Humanities Work

Stanfill says the grant will fund course redesign efforts over the next two years. Faculty and graduate student participants will adapt existing undergraduate digital humanities courses to meaningfully incorporate AI in ways that align with humanistic expertise. Stanfill’s scholarship has recently received national recognition. In 2025, they were awarded the National Communication Association’s Diamond Anniversary Book Award for their book “Fandom Is Ugly: Networked Harassment in Participatory Culture”.

“It’s about integrating AI in a way that makes sense for each course and for what humanities already bring to the table,” Stanfill says. “The goal is to enhance — not replace — the core strengths of humanities scholarship.”

The funding will also support stipends that allow participants in the program to experiment with advanced AI tools that are expensive to access.

“They are more cost-intensive,” Salter says. “Part of what this grant allows us to do is give students real access — not just a limited sandbox version — so they can fully understand what these tools can do.”

The implications extend to areas such as archival transcription and preservation. Advances in handwriting recognition and large-scale document analysis could help students work with under-digitized collections in new ways.

“If you can bring a class into an archive that’s been underappreciated and use these tools, you can build searchable databases and identify patterns in ways that used to require years of manual labor,” Salter says.

The grant strengthens �����’s position as a leader in digital humanities education, the researchers say. By fostering collaboration across disciplines and encouraging thoughtful AI integration, the texts and technology program aims to model how humanities scholarship can evolve alongside technological innovation.

The “Building a Digital Humanities Generative AI Learning Community”  project has been made possible in part by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Democracy demands wisdom. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

�����’s two teams include faculty from every department in the College of Arts and Humanities. The first, led by Associate Dean Peter Larson (professor, history), includes Meghan Velez (assistant professor, writing and rhetoric), Jonathan Beever (professor of philosophy), Matt Dombrowski ’05 ’08 MFA  (professor, visual arts and design), Melissa Scott (lecturer, performing arts), Lisa Logan (associate professor, English) and Taoues Hadour (assistant professor, modern languages and literatures). Their project will focus on building AI literacy across the arts and humanities through course design, policy recommendations and sharable resources.

The second team, led by Anastasia Salter (professor, English; director, texts and technologies), includes Rudy McDaniel (professor, English; director, visual arts and design) and Sherry Rankins-Robertson (professor, writing and rhetoric). Their work will explore the viability of creating a college-level center on AI scholarship, teaching and learning, as well as opportunities for funding, partnerships and community engagement.

In addition, four UCF employees are serving as AI fellows and mentors for the institute: Rankins-Robertson, Thomas Cavanaugh (vice president, digital learning) and Rohan Jowallah (senior instructional designer, Center for Distributed Learning), all returning for a second year, and newcomer Kevin Yee ’90 (special assistant to the provost, UCF Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning). Rankins-Robertson and Jowallah also serve on the AAC&U institute faculty.

“The fact that we have enthusiastic participation from faculty in every department in the College of Arts and Humanities demonstrates how seriously we’re taking this moment,” says Jeff Moore, dean of the college. “AI is changing how we teach, how students learn and what employers expect. This is our chance to rethink how we prepare students for today’s classrooms and tomorrow’s careers.”

This year’s institute includes more than 1,220 participants across 192 teams.

“The Princeton Review rankings reflect the high quality of our interactive game development programs at UCF.”

This is the tenth straight year that (FIEA), �����’s graduate game development program, has been named one of the top five programs in the world by the Princeton Review. And �����’s undergraduate department moved up 23 places from 2018’s ranking of 36.

“The Princeton Review rankings reflect the high quality of our interactive game development programs at UCF,” says Robert S. Littlefield, director of the . “We are very pleased that the extraordinary efforts of our faculty to provide high-quality instruction to growing numbers of students has been recognized as being among the best in the world. I look forward to even higher rankings for the programs in the future.”

Both programs will be located at UCF Downtown starting in Fall 2019. In partnership with Valencia College, the brand-new campus will bring 7,700 students to live, learn and work in downtown Orlando.

“I’m pleased that the Princeton Review has recognized �����’s continued focus on gaming education at the undergraduate and graduate level,” says Ben Noel, executive director of FIEA. “As we continue to grow, I expect UCF Downtown to become an even greater hub for game design education and industry collaboration.”

“Our department of Games and Interactive Media offers a space for student to develop their creative voices through expressive work across platforms, ranging from video games, mobile applications and websites to virtual and augmented reality experiments,” says assistant director Anastasia Salter. “The faculty appreciate this recognition of the department’s continual efforts to provide this excellence at �����’s impressive scale and community impact.”

Since opening its doors in 2005, FIEA has graduated 671 students. Graduates are working at more than 230 companies around the world, including Apple, DreamWorks, Electronic Arts, Blizzard, Bungie, Zynga, RockStar, Ubisoft, Disney, Microsoft and Nintendo.

The Games and Interactive Media department is part of the interdisciplinary Nicholson School of Communication and Media. The department serves more than 1,000 students and offers undergraduate specializations in Game Design and Web and Social Platforms, as well as a Master of Arts in Digital Media.

The Princeton Review chose the programs based on its 2018 survey of 150 institutions in the U.S., Canada and abroad that offer game design degree programs or courses. The 40-question survey gathered data on everything from �����’s game design academic offerings and lab facilities to the program’s graduates’ starting salaries and career achievements. More than 40 data points in four areas (academics, faculty, technology and career) were analyzed to tally the lists.

In addition to being published today on The Princeton Review website, the listing will also be featured in the May issue of PC Gamer magazine, on newsstands March 26.