Prof. Ana Ilievska

American University of Beirut – Mediterraneo

In the age of artificial intelligence and technofeudalism, questions of moderation, critique, and human self-realization gain renewed urgency. This talk brings the Marxist humanism of the Yugoslav Praxis School, Albert Camus’s pensée de midi, and Franco Cassano’s Southern Thought into conversation to envision a “third-way” ethics rooted in Southern Europe and the Mediterranean. Read side by side, these projects promote moderation, slowness, and human self-realization through shared struggle and experience, refusing absolutes while affirming dialogue. Such a transversal reading opens horizons for coexistence, shared thought as well as the cultivation of affirmative, dialogical futures in the region.

Ana Ilievska is Assistant Professor of Global Liberal Arts at the American University of Beirut–Mediterraneo and holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Chicago (2020). Before joining AUB-Med, she was Senior Research Fellow on the Bonn–Cambridge project “Desirable AI” and taught at Stanford University (2021–2023). Her research focuses on late 19th- and early 20th-century Southern European/Mediterranean literature and thought, exploring non-hegemonic humanistic perspectives on technology and AI. A Fulbright alumna, Ilievska is co-editor of Pirandello and Alienation (in print, September 2025) and editor of Humanism and AI (forthcoming in 2026). Ilievska has published widely on Southern European authors, poetry, critical thinking, and the humanities in the age of AI, and has spoken at leading academic and industry conferences across Europe, North America, and Asia.