Sean Kelly, professor of English, has been selected to deliver Wilkes University’s 2024 Paul A. O’Hop Final Word Lecture. His presentation, “Reading, Writing, and Wilkes University’s Mission of Liberal Education: Questioning AI’s Value as a Learning Tool,” will take place at 6 p.m. on Monday, April 29, in the Jean and Paul Adams Commons. It is free and open to the public.
Kelly has taught composition and American literature courses for 16 years at Wilkes and now serves as the director of the Writing Center. His talk argues that embracing AI as a reading and writing tool in the university fundamentally undermines the cognitive, social and ethical growth that students can experience through writing because it forecloses the necessarily recursive, open-ended and social nature of the meaning-making process.
Kelly received his bachelor of arts degree in English from the University of Tennessee–Knoxville, his master of arts degree in English from the University of Pittsburgh and his doctoral degree in English from the State University of New York at Buffalo.
The annual Paul A. O’Hop Final Word Lecture was established by the late Paul O’Hop to foster the exchange of ideas and dialogue among faculty, staff and administrators and to showcase the talents and scholarly abilities at Wilkes University. O’Hop retired from Wilkes in 2001 after serving 16 years as vice president of business affairs and auxiliary enterprises. Faculty honorees are selected via a competitive application process overseen by the Provost’s Committee on Research.
