Active Students (as of Fall 2025)*
Graduate students: 62
Graduate certificates: 5
2025-26 Student Credit Hours: 714
*All active students with declared CAH programs are included in the enrollment counts.
UCF’s Texts & Technology Ph.D. program continued to advance interdisciplinary scholarship at the intersection of humanities and technology, earning national recognition for its research, supporting innovative students and faculty work, and expanding conversations around the role of emerging technologies in education and culture.
In early 2026, the program received a National Endowment for the Humanities grant to launch Building a Digital Humanities Generative AI Learning Community, a 24-month initiative led by Professor Anastasia Salter and Associate Professor Mel Stanfill. UCF was the only institution in Florida selected for a National Endowments for the Humanities award this cycle and was one of just 84 funded projects nationwide. The initiative will support faculty and graduate students in thoughtfully integrating generative AI into humanities teaching. The project builds on T&T’s long tradition of teaching creative problem-solving through technology, and reflects our conviction that humanities expertise is essential, not incidental, to understanding and shaping AI’s role in culture and education.
Faculty continued to contribute research and creative scholarship in areas including AI-enhanced storytelling, digital archiving, community-engaged public history, and innovative pedagogical technologies. During the year, T&T faculty participated in the Association of American Colleges and Universities’ Institute on AI, Pedagogy and the Curriculum. In addition, Stanfill received the National Communication Association’s Diamond Anniversary Book Award for Fandom Is Ugly: Networked Harassment in Participatory Culture.
Current students represented UCF through presentations and peer-reviewed publications at scholarly venues around the world. Their work explored topics such as representation in games, online communities, algorithmic activism and AI design, second-language acquisition through K-Pop fandom, and writing center pedagogy. Students presented at international venues including the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, the Electronic Literature Organization, and the University of the Arts London, as well as local events such as UCF Libraries’ AI Day, the Sunshine State Teaching and Learning Conference, and UCF’s Student Scholar Symposium. At the symposium, Yingzi Kong received the Judges’ Choice Award for her poster examining the use of generative AI in game-based language learning.
The program also celebrated the accomplishments of eight doctoral graduates since August 2025. Their dissertations reflect the breadth of T&T scholarship, with research spanning game studies, fan studies, social media and geopolitics, activist textile making, and emoji studies.
As an interdisciplinary program bringing together humanities inquiry and emerging technologies, Texts & Technologies prepares graduates to be leaders in academia, technology companies, cultural institutions, government, publishing, and nonprofit organizations. This year’s accomplishments highlight the program’s continued contributions to research, teaching, and public scholarship while examining how technology shapes communication, culture, and learning.