The AI and History Conference 2026, October 15–16, 2026 at Johns Hopkins University, is a practitioner-focused convening for historians at all career stages who are working with, teaching, or trying to evaluate AI and computational methods in their research and institutions. This event is anchored squarely in historical practice: its organizing questions are what AI can do for historians specifically, and what structural, methodological, and professional changes the discipline needs to make computational methods sustainable and rigorous.
The conference addresses the full range of experience, from historians sent by their departments to report back on AI, to scholars already producing advanced computational work, by running sessions leveled for different backgrounds in parallel rather than forcing everyone into the same room. It treats AI as consequential on two fronts at once: as a tool for large-scale research that was previously impossible for a single historian to undertake, and as a way to rejuvenate the classroom. Attendees should leave with a network of peers, a clearer sense of the field’s best current work, and concrete skills or project plans they can use immediately.