An AI-Forward Approach to Teaching Literature: Distant Writing Meets Close Reading

Dr. Rachel A. Blumenthal is an educator and scholar living in the Bay Area. As Chair of the Upper School English Department at Menlo School, she gets to collaborate every day with thoughtful, passionate teachers in the mission to make literary studies relevant for young people striving to understand themselves and their world. Emerging technologies like AI have unsettled some of the assumptions that have long organized humanities instruction, and Rachel takes that unsettlement seriously, asking questions about what it means to read, write, and think in an era of copious text generation. Her advanced English seminar (co-taught with Douglas Kiang), Literature in the Age of AI, grew out of those questions, as did her recent peer-reviewed article (co-authored with Eric Hengstebeck), “Does Writing Have a Future in the Age of A.I.?” in Arizona Quarterly (2025). She has been an active voice in conversations about AI and pedagogy, serving as Co-Chair (with Jamie Formato) of Menlo School’s AI Working Group (2023) and presenting on “Thinking With AI in the Humanities” at professional development events (2025). Her teaching philosophy centers students as recursive writers and dynamic thinkers, a framework she brings to questions about how AI is reshaping literary study.