Shane Baker

Background

About Shane Baker

A teacher of 16 years; writer and researcher; lifelong learner. As a scholar of literature, I want to understand how literary imagination straddles the divide between religious and secular in the modern West, especially with regard to cultural constructions of nature, wilderness, or environment. My work engages with the environmental humanities, ritual studies, Abrahamic mystical traditions, literary epiphany, phenomenology, new materialism, and psychoanalysis. A new concern I have as a researcher and instructor is AI: Can LLM's be effectively and ethically incorporated into the workflows of humanities researchers, and what are the benefits and risks of doing so? Can students be taught to engage with LLM's such that they are not a crutch, but a useful pedagogical tool for improving their writing?