Studying IPHS at Kenyon
As a student in Kenyon’s oldest interdisciplinary program, you will explore how different cultures have answered life’s fundamental questions. What makes a good life? How do we live in a community? Why do we have art? What defines our humanity? You will consider these questions from multiple perspectives, studying with faculty from across the curriculum.
Explore human ideas, creations and inventions that have defined our present.
Classes in the Integrated Program in Humane Studies are for those who won’t settle for either/or and who are not content with a single perspective. The program’s first-year course explores human ideas, creations and inventions that have defined our present, from the origins of poetry and philosophy to the foundations of computer science.
Focus on real-world challenges.
Later courses dive more deeply into our present and even our future. Can we program our humanity into our inventions or will we be shaped irrevocably by our tools? Can AI know us better than ourselves and offer a mirror onto our very nature? By the end of the concentration, students will have a digital portfolio of hands-on projects that focus on real-world challenges. Concentrators have the opportunity to join the KDH lab and be part of a collaborative multi-disciplinary team engaged in cutting-edge research.
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.
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Digital Humanities 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 participated in a conversation for the OpenAI Forum program "Discoveries Across Disciplines" that explored how AI is accelerating academic research.
Kenyon College
Gambier, Ohio 43022