The Brown and White – “[H]umanists should be thinking about tech from the get-go and tech folks should be thinking about humanities from the get-go,” Snyder tells the university’s student newspaper. He and Edwards, who met at Amherst and are married, co-teach “Algorithms and Social Justice,” cross-listed in women, gender & sexuality studies and industrial & systems engineering.
“After first meeting in an undergraduate Chaucer poetry class at Amherst College … Edwards and Snyder got married in 1998 and both began teaching at Lehigh in 2003,” says the article, written by Arava Rose. “Now, Edwards is an associate professor of English in addition to women, gender and sexuality studies, splitting her time between the two fields. Snyder is a professor of industrial and systems engineering and the director of the Institute for Data, Intelligent Systems and Computation.”
After a conversation about the potential for computer algorithms to detect bias in writing, the professors realized “they wanted humanities students to have technical competence and engineers to have knowledge about critical race theory, feminist theory, queer theory, disability studies and more.” They have been teaching “Algorithms and Social Justice” since 2022.