Personal website: https://yunusdogantelliel.net/

I am an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Rhetoric, and the director of the Great Problems Seminar program—WPI’s interdisciplinary and experiential STEM education program for first-year students. Before joining WPI, I was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley.

My work is animated by an intellectual curiosity with how ideas travel across time and space, and generate diverse practices of thinking and feeling. I am especially intrigued by transformations through which people come to ask new questions about themselves and others, in ways that require reconsideration of past experiences and imagining of future possibilities. Such situations, I believe, capture an important aspect of the human condition—the intertwining trajectories of power and authority, on the one hand, and creativity and innovation, on the other.

My forthcoming book, Languages of the Qur’an: Science, Translation, and Religion in Turkey (Indiana University Press), discusses a similar situation among young Muslims in Turkey. It presents an ethnographic analysis of how Muslims navigate religious texts and traditional interpretations within the framework of secularism and modern science. This book draws on my fieldwork funded by the National Science Foundation and the Wenner-Gren Foundation. 

In addition, I have co-edited three volumes: Science, Religion, and Secularity: The View from Relations (Bloomsbury); Science, Engineering, and Sustainable Development (De Gruyter); and Spatial Justice and Refugees (Center for Spatial Justice, Istanbul; in Turkish).

I am currently working on two book projects. The first builds on my research on generative AI in art, science, and religion. Most of the mainstream thinking on AI is comparative. In trying to make sense of AI and its capabilities, many technologists tend to presume a single, coherent human identity that can serve as an object of comparison. Tentatively titled “The Fall and Rise of Humanism: Computing the Human in the Age of Generative AI,” this book analyzes how such comparative thinking has given birth to a new (technological) anthropology that defends ’the human’ while erasing differences among humans. 

The second book project is at an earlier stage and draws on my ethnographic study of STEM education in the context of AI’s challenge to higher education institutions. My starting point is a question: why have North American universities struggled to develop meaningful collective responses to AI in teaching and learning? Tentatively titled “University as a Multitude: Scaling against Scaling,” the book develops a pluralistic and democratic model for institutionalizing pedagogical change. In parallel to this project, I have co-developed and co-facilitated critical AI literacy training programs for faculty and staff at WPI and other schools.

My other scholarly projects have reflected my interests as an applied/design anthropologist focusing on the ethics of human-computer interaction. I have collaborated with engineering researchers on five different National Science Foundation-funded projects on the future of work and technology. I was the social sciences lead of WPI’s NSF Research Traineeship Program on ’Future of Robots in the Workplace’ and organized a ’social impact of research’ workshop series for graduate student trainees. I have served as a co-chair of the IEEE Brain Neuroethics Subcommittee’s ’Work and Employment’ working group. In addition, with two Public Interest Technology University Network (PIT-UN) grants, my scholarship has forged new connections between applied technology ethics and engineering education. As a proponent of translational humanities, I have applied an anthropological lens to technology design in two projects: SWAP (an algorithm-based resource-sharing platform for nonprofits) and WheelUp! (a virtual reality training simulator for new users of powered wheelchairs).

I teach courses on rhetoric and semiotics, research methods, critical design, AI/robot ethics, and AI in language, communication, and media. Inspired by WPI’s ethos of project-based learning and informed by my collaborations with fellow educators at WPI’s Center for Project-Based Learning, my classes are structured around team projects that help students see themselves and their classmates as active participants in the process of knowledge production and dissemination. I work with undergraduate students on their Professional Writing senior capstone projects examining the rhetoric of science, technology, and engineering. I also advise PhD and MS students at WPI’s Interactive Media and Game Development program. 

Visit Digital WPI to view student research and projects advised by Professor Telliel