Our ability to pay attention is a core human capacity. It helps us sustain relationships, create knowledge, and experience beauty. Indeed, the ability to decide what merits our attention lies at the heart of human agency. Today, however, our powers of attention feel under siege as every pause in thought risks being filled by another digital demand–another message, notification, or post. As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly adept at predicting and mimicking human attention, these pressures only intensify. In a world increasingly organized around capturing and monetizing human focus, writers and researchers warn that the attention economy and the technologies upon which it is built are fueling an “attention crisis” with potentially severe consequences, including an epidemic of mental illness and attention disorders, the loss of meaningful social connections, informational illiteracy, and an inability to do the kind of sustained and deep thinking required to solve complex problems.

Such grave warnings call for our collective–and scholarly–attention. At the heart of current debates lie fundamental questions about what attention is, why it has become such a moral and social concern, and how digital technologies and artificial intelligence are reshaping our habits of focus. Are we confronting a genuine crisis, or another cycle of anxiety about cultural and technological change? Historical, philosophical, and psychological perspectives invite us to consider how attention has long been cultivated as a habit of mind, and contemporary critiques ask what it means when attention is bought and sold in advertising markets. These conversations call for the university’s consideration, pressing us to consider what kinds of attention we should foster, protect, or reimagine in the years ahead for ourselves and our students.

The 2026–27 John W. Altman Program in the Humanities, “Attention in the Age of Distraction,” will explore these questions across a year of lectures, symposia, and courses that bring together scholars, artists, educators, and students from across the university. At stake is nothing less than how we think, relate, and create meaning together. By reflecting on attention, Miami University's Humanities Center invites us to consider what it means to truly attend–to one another, to the world, and to the life of the  mind–in an environment that never stops calling for our focus.

The Humanities Center invites applications from faculty interested in joining the 2026-27 Altman Program on Attention in the Age of Distraction led by next year’s Atlman fellows Dr. Andrew Hebard and Dr. Matthew Crain.  
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Six Altman Scholars will be appointed. All will receive $2000 in professional expenses.  Altman Faculty Scholars are expected to the do the following:

Application.
The program is open to tenure-line and TCPL faculty. Applications should contain:

Please submit your application in a single PDF document titled “[insert your last name] 2026-27Altman Faculty Application.pdf” to humanitiesgrants@miamioh.edu by Friday, January 30, 2026.

Please direct questions to Ron Becker, Interim Director of the Humanities Center, at beckerrp@miamioh.edu