Zac Zimmer

Zac Zimmer is Associate Professor of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he works at the intersection of technology, culture, and political economy in the hemispheric Americas. His research examines how technological systems — from colonial-era extractive economies to contemporary AI infrastructure — shape who gets access to knowledge, and who gets left out. That animating question connects his historical scholarship directly to the present challenge of building public, equitable, and accountable AI infrastructure.

Zimmer’s most recent book, First Contact: Speculative Visions of the Conquest of the Americas (Northwestern University Press, 2025), traces how imaginative literature has long been a site for working through the ethics of encounter, extraction, and technological power. His peer-reviewed article “Bitcoin and Potosí Silver: Historical Perspectives on Cryptocurrency” (Technology and Culture, 2017) draws a through-line from colonial silver extraction to contemporary digital economies, demonstrating that questions of resource access and financial exclusion are structurally recurring — and that understanding their history is essential to designing systems that don’t repeat them. More recently, his article “Outlier and Collapse: The Enron Corpus and Foundation Model Training Data” (Big Data & Society, 2026) examines how the accidental composition of publicly available datasets — shaped by corporate history, litigation, and digital preservation — quietly determines what AI systems learn and therefore whom they serve. His essay “El ingenio de la inteligencia (The Knowledge Mill)” (Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 2024) develops a humanistic framework for analyzing AI as a system of labor, extraction, and value, bringing literary and cultural analysis to bear on questions typically confined to technical disciplines.

Zimmer has led a sustained, grant-funded effort to build responsible AI literacy across California’s higher education ecosystem. He directed the National Humanities Center’s Responsible AI Curriculum Development Program (2022–24, $100,000) and its successor Responsible AI Partnership Project (2024–26, $50,000), which links UCSC directly with the Bay Area Community College Consortium to extend AI ethics education to institutions that are typically excluded from frontier AI conversations. He is currently co-PI on “THINK at UCSC: Technology and Humanities Integrated Knowledge,” a National Endowment for the Humanities HSI Initiatives Grant (2025–28, $149,968) supporting the integration of humanistic AI literacy into undergraduate education at a Hispanic-Serving Institution. He has spoken publicly on these themes at the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco, the UC AI Congress at UCLA, and CUNY’s Art Science Connect AI Symposium, among other venues.

Zimmer is a co-founder of UCSC’s Ethics and Astrobiology Reading Group and edited the “Ethics and Astrobiology” series for the UC Humanities Research Institute’s Foundry platform, convening humanists, scientists, and ethicists around questions that cross traditional disciplinary lines. He contributed to the “Adventures in AI” exhibition at The Exploratorium (Summer 2025) and to the interdisciplinary show “Weather and the Whale: An Aesthetics of Resilience” at UCSC’s Institute for Arts and Sciences (Spring 2025), reflecting a consistent commitment to carrying humanistic perspectives on technology into public and civic spaces.

Zimmer holds a Ph.D. in Hispanic Studies from Cornell University (2011) and a B.A. in Comparative Literature and Society from Columbia University (2003), where he graduated Magna Cum Laude with Phi Beta Kappa honors. At UCSC he is affiliated with Latin American and Latino Studies, the Dolores Huerta Research Center of the Americas, Legal Studies, the Astrobiology Initiative, and the Digital Humanities Initiative. His work offers public AI infrastructure efforts a historically grounded, equity-centered analytical framework — and a demonstrated record of translating that framework into curriculum, public engagement, and cross-institutional collaboration across California.