Since 1975, the Integrated Program in Humane Studies (IPHS) has been Kenyon's oldest interdisciplinary program, grounding students in humanity's most enduring inquires: What is justice? What can we know? What is power, and who should wield it?
In the Odyssey sequence, students read their way from Homer through the modern period, encountering foundational texts and the questions they raise. IPHS provides training in how to identify what questions need to be asked — not just how to answer the ones already on the table.
In 2016, that foundation became the launchpad for something new. IPHS co-founded Kenyon's AI CoLab and faculty members Kate Elkins and Jon Chun created the world's first human-centered AI curriculum in 2016: a program designed not to train computer scientists, but to prepare thinkers who can investigate the human dimensions of artificial intelligence across the humanities and social sciences.
Today, IPHS students bring the conceptual depth of humanistic training to the quantitative capabilities of AI. The result is that IPHS students graduate with portfolios of original computational research. They analyze political discourse across 316,000 tweets, evaluate LLM decision-making for the U.S. AI Safety Institute, investigate surveillance capitalism in social media Terms of Service, and build AI tools to rescue endangered cultural archives. Their work has been downloaded almost 100,000 times from institutions including Stanford, MIT, Oxford, and Berkeley, reaching every country in the world.
IPHS has been recognized by Schmidt Sciences, the U.S. AI Safety Institute (NIST CAISI), OpenAI, UNESCO, the IBM/Notre Dame Tech Ethics Lab and Forbes, which profiled the program as a model for human-centered AI education.
IPHS Courses
IPHS courses begin with IPHS 111-112Y Odyssey: Pursuit of Wisdom and Understanding. Advanced students continue with AI for Humanity (IPHS 300), Frontiers in Generative AI (IPHS 391) and the Senior Seminar (IPHS 484). View all IPHS courses.
Featured Courses
Programming Humanity
Artificial intelligence is poised to surpass us in abilities we associate with being human. Can we program humanity by using AI to analyze text and produce art? Or will we be programmed through predictive policing, social media manipulation and surveillance? This class bridges the gap between humanities and technology.
Aristophanes: Politics and Comedy
Political comedy didn’t start with late-night TV. This seminar studies four plays by Aristophanes, the unrivaled master of combining comic vulgarity with philosophical wisdom, and explores questions about power, justice, war, gender, religion and the tension between private and public good.
Odyssey: Pursuit of Wisdom and Understanding
Explore themes of love, justice, purity and power, reading from the Bible, Plato, Dante and more. Later, we focus on themes of law, disorder, harmony, entropy, and modernity, including study of Shakespeare, Darwin and Marx. At the same time, we examine connections between the visual arts, literature and philosophy.
AI for Humanity
This interdisciplinary, humanities-centered coding course explores the philosophical and ethical questions raised by the advent of artificial intelligence. We explore AI as a mirror of both our best and worst natures: how it can surveil, disemploy and police, but also play games, write text, create images and compose music.
Related News
Schmidt Sciences is funding a faculty-led AI project to help preserve endangered archives as part of the nonprofit’s Humanities and AI Virtual Institute.
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Could AI Save Endangered Archives?
In the News — Ohio NewsroomDeterioration is endangering historical archives across the country. Kenyon faculty members Katherine Elkins and Jon Chun are working with a team of students to help preserve materials from collections like the New Orleans Jazz Museum.
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Where AI Meets The Humanities: Inside Kenyon College’s Bold Experiment
In the News — ForbesForbes interviews Professor Kate Elkins about an ambitious new initiative from Kenyon's AI Lab.
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Discoveries Across Disciplines
In the News — Open AI ForumProfessor Kate Elkins joined five faculty and researchers from other institutions to discuss how AI is accelerating research in science, the humanities and visual arts during the OpenAI Forum.
Human-Centered AI at Kenyon
Identify new avenues of research using unexplored datasets of text, image and sound, and embrace new computational frameworks that are increasingly powerful and easy to use. Students interested in digital humanities are encouraged to take the introductory course "Programming Humanity." Advanced courses include "AI for Humanity."
Faculty Spotlight
Professor of Humanities and Comparative Literature Katherine Elkins recently gave an invited talk in a conversation for the OpenAI Forum program "Discoveries Across Disciplines" that explored how AI is accelerating academic research.
Kenyon College
Gambier, Ohio 43022