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X-ORIGINAL-URL:https://www.ssns.org.uk/
X-WR-CALNAME:Scottish Society for Northern Studies
X-WR-CALDESC:Exploring the Northern World
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BEGIN:VEVENT
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UID:MEC-376ff830e4695b5f4a487f430a5fa7b7@ssns.org.uk
DTSTART:20260616T180000Z
DTEND:20260616T200000Z
DTSTAMP:20260531T170400Z
CREATED:20260531
LAST-MODIFIED:20260601
PRIORITY:5
SEQUENCE:76
TRANSP:OPAQUE
SUMMARY:SSNS Seminar – Dr. Timothy Liam Waters – ‘Machine-Made Medievalisms: AI Vikings, Digital Folklore, and the Politics of ‘Authenticity’
DESCRIPTION:The SSNS Seminar Series continues on Tuesday 16th June 2026 with Dr. Timothy Liam Waters for his talk on Machine-Made Medievalisms: AI Vikings, Digital Folklore, and the Politics of “Authenticity”\nThis is a free, ticketed event; please register below.\nAbstract:\nAI-generated images of the Viking Age now circulate widely across digital environments, from historical enthusiast communities and meme pages to religious forums, political pages, and ideologically inflected social media groups. In these spaces, such images are praised, mocked, denounced, and defended by users with strikingly divergent ideas about history, heritage, identity, and authority. At the heart of these debates lies a deceptively simple question: what kinds of images are allowed to represent an authentic Viking past?\nThis talk examines how “AI Vikings” continue the long history of the Viking as a contested discursive object, mobilized across competing claims to identity, cultural heritage, and the medieval past. I argue that skepticism toward AI-generated Viking imagery exposes older assumptions about legitimacy that have shaped the study and reception of folklore from the discipline’s early concern with medieval origins to the present. Across different online contexts, AI’s apparent lack of “right” to represent the Viking Age is rejected for different reasons, but these rejections repeatedly depend on pre-existing narratives about what the Viking Age is, who it belongs to, and how it ought to appear.\nBio:\nTimothy Liam Waters is a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Center for Folklore Studies at The Ohio State University. His research focuses on literary materialisms, generative AI, and folkloric reception in the Old Norse literary corpus. He has taught undergraduate courses on topics such as the representation of myth in modern media, Viking-Age travel literature, and Old Norse language.\nRegistration below. Details for the Zoom meeting will be emailed in advance of the seminar.\n\n
URL:https://www.ssns.org.uk/events/ssns-seminar-machine-made-medievalisms/
ORGANIZER;CN=Scottish Society for Northern Studies:MAILTO:
LOCATION:Online
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