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Integrated Program in Humane Studies · Kenyon College
What it means to be human. What makes a life worth living. What makes a good society. Over half a century of asking, at Kenyon — now in conversation with the machines we have made.
Built in a small village in Ohio. Read in more countries than the UN has members.
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What is humane studies?
Long before universities divided knowledge into departments, people asked questions that crossed the humanities, social sciences, arts, and sciences. What does it mean to be human? What makes a life worth living? What do we owe one another? How should knowledge and power be used?
The founding questions
IPHS was founded in 1975 to make room for that larger conversation. Co-founder Robert Goodhand taught three of its original courses: Human Predicament in Nature, Human Predicament in History, and Freedom and Responsibility in the Modern World. Their titles give the program’s “big questions” a durable shape:
What makes us human, and what do we need to flourish?
Which parts of our inheritance remain valuable, and which assumptions should we rethink?
Given those natural and historical conditions, what ought we create?
Odyssey has always been broad because human life is broad. Students encounter works and ideas from many periods and traditions, while faculty from across the College teach in conversation with one another. The aim is not coverage for its own sake, but the understanding that becomes possible when Homer, Plato, political philosophy, intellectual history, literature, religion, science, music, and the arts are not sealed off from one another.
The six-part Modern Scholar series The Odyssey of the West brought IPHS faculty and colleagues together in recorded lectures distributed internationally through Audible and library platforms. Tim Shutt, Katherine Elkins, Fred Baumann, Ted Buehrer, Joel Richeimer, and others introduced listeners around the world to the literature, philosophy, history, politics, religion, and art of the Western tradition.
Katherine Elkins’s Modern Scholar courses on the modern novel and French literature extended that public work. Together, these lectures established an international audience for the kind of integrated inquiry long practiced in IPHS.
Machines now produce language, tell stories, influence decisions, preserve and distort memory, and participate in institutions. Understanding them requires programming, statistics, and machine learning. It also requires knowledge of language and interpretation, history and culture, political and social life, ethics, law, and human judgment.
In 2016, IPHS began building a human-centered AI curriculum that brought these forms of knowledge together. It did not replace the older program. Building technologies that serve people requires an understanding of human nature and flourishing. It requires examining inherited ideas about intelligence, creativity, autonomy, and the good life. And because the technologies we create can reshape how we think, relate, and live, it makes the program’s founding questions newly urgent.
The full timeline →IPHS at 50 · Homecoming 2026
Catch up on the anniversary weekend through The Kenyon Collegian’s coverage and Kenyon’s photo gallery.
Explore the 50th anniversary →Our early years are underrepresented here. We’d love your memories of IPHS classes, professors, and life in Timberlake—as well as photographs or dates that could help fill out the timeline.
Share a memory or a piece of history →We’ll be in touch before adding your contribution to the site.
We’d love to welcome you back during reunion for another memorable IPHS seminar. If there’s interest, we’ll gather again around the table for readings, questions, and conversation. Let us know you’re coming!
Let us know you’re coming →Robert Goodhand co-conceives the Integrated Program in Humane Studies. The program launches the following year.
Kenyon’s faculty record →Michael Evans, with co-founders Robert Goodhand and Richard Hettlinger, launches the Integrated Program in Humane Studies. It becomes Kenyon's oldest interdisciplinary program.
Alumni recollection
Read the memory →Richard Hettlinger, Fred Turner, Bill Frame, and Prof. Goodhand live in my heart forever as alma paters.
Richard Hettlinger moves from the Religion Department to IPHS, as recorded in Kenyon’s faculty chronology.
Faculty chronology →Decades of seminars, tutorials, and Odyssey. If you were there, this is your part of the record.
Send us a milestone →Tim Shutt joins Kenyon’s English faculty. He later teaches in IPHS and directs the program.
Source →Alumni recollection
Read the memory →Professor Leonard Gordon was incredible, I've always wanted to thank him for his patience and willingness to help me look deeper into subjects where I felt vastly out of my depth.
Kenyon awards co-founder and former IPHS director Robert Goodhand an honorary degree, recognizing his teaching and contribution to the College.
Kenyon’s faculty record →Timothy Shutt (IPHS) receives Kenyon’s junior-faculty teaching award.
Source →Michael Brint (IPHS) receives Kenyon’s junior-faculty teaching award.
Source →Alumni recollection
Read the memory →I remember going on walks with Michael Brint and discussing tragedy, sitting at lunch with Tim Shutt discussing Dante, and talking with Michael Evans after class about modernist art.
Alumni recollection
Read the memory →The late nights/all nighters spent in Timberlake house….brilliant and wide ranging conversations with Michael Brint and Tim Shutt. Nothing but meaningful mentorship and soulful guidance at an impressionable time.
Alumni recollection
Read the memory →Both shaped how I think today, and I find myself coming back to the same questions and thinkers
Katherine Elkins joins the program, teaching Modernism and later Postmodernism.
Recorded Books releases Tim Shutt's “Dante and His Divine Comedy.” His Odyssey of the West series follows, carrying the program's great-books teaching to listeners far beyond Gambier.
Michael Evans retires after 44 years teaching at Kenyon, including in history and IPHS.
Source →The new Michael Evans Seminar Room at Timberlake opens in spring 2009, honoring his contribution to IPHS.
Timberlake opening →Alumni recollection
Read the memory →So many fond memories of Professor Shutt. He was such a formative part of my Kenyon experience.
Alumni recollection
Read the memory →I am eternally thankful for IPHS and Prof. Shutt and Prof. Elkins! It gave me a well rounded education in the classics and showed me what interdisciplinary study and the liberal arts is truly about.
Lisa Leibowitz begins teaching in Odyssey and the program’s Aristophanes course.
Source →Katherine Elkins and Jon Chun create the world's first human-centered AI curriculum and found the AI CoLab.
Students train neural networks to generate sheet music and 3D sculpture, the year before GPT-2 is announced.
Students fine-tune GPT-2 within months of its staged release.
The GPT-3 Writer's Turing Test (Journal of Cultural Analytics), grown from classroom research, becomes a touchstone in debates about machine authorship.
Tim Shutt retires from Kenyon after 35 years at the College.
Source →The Shapes of Stories (Cambridge University Press) publishes the SentimentArcs method. Within weeks of ChatGPT's launch, a student completes a systematic jailbreak study later cited by Meta AI researchers.
“The Crisis of Artificial Intelligence” (International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing) defines what a human-centered AI curriculum looks like and names the field AI Digital Humanities.
The federal government forms a consortium to set national AI safety standards. Elkins and Chun are chosen to lead the team representing the Modern Language Association (NIST CAISI).
Katherine Elkins delivers “The Shape of a Life,” Kenyon’s December 20 baccalaureate address, revisiting David Foster Wallace’s “This Is Water” through Proust and the unexpected turns of a life.
Read the baccalaureate address →Schmidt Sciences selects Archival Intelligence for its Humanities and AI Virtual Institute, 1 of 23 teams worldwide from more than 600 applications. Students trained in Frontiers in Generative AI win the Most Original Project award at HackOH/IO, Ohio's largest hackathon.
Student research downloads pass 135,000, reaching more than 4,000 institutions in 198 countries. The IPHS 50th Anniversary was marked during Homecoming weekend, September 25–26, 2026.
In their own words
Selected excerpts from alumni memories shared in 2026. Contributor names and class years are omitted.
Prof. William Frame was amazing - and tough!
So many fond memories of Professor Shutt. He was such a formative part of my Kenyon experience.
Both shaped how I think today, and I find myself coming back to the same questions and thinkers
I remember going on walks with Michael Brint and discussing tragedy, sitting at lunch with Tim Shutt discussing Dante, and talking with Michael Evans after class about modernist art.
Richard Hettlinger, Fred Turner, Bill Frame, and Prof. Goodhand live in my heart forever as alma paters.
Professor Leonard Gordon was incredible, I've always wanted to thank him for his patience and willingness to help me look deeper into subjects where I felt vastly out of my depth.
The late nights/all nighters spent in Timberlake house….brilliant and wide ranging conversations with Michael Brint and Tim Shutt. Nothing but meaningful mentorship and soulful guidance at an impressionable time.
I use what I learned in IPHS seminars regularly
many of the same texts that I first encountered in IPHS.
I am eternally thankful for IPHS and Prof. Shutt and Prof. Elkins! It gave me a well rounded education in the classics and showed me what interdisciplinary study and the liberal arts is truly about.
IPHS changed the way I look at and engage with the world.
In Memoriam
Tim Shutt came to Kenyon in 1986 and was for decades the intellectual heart of IPHS, which he long directed. His Dante lectures filled Philomathesian Hall to overflowing, and generations of students met the Divine Comedy, Chaucer, and the Icelandic sagas through him. He retired in 2021 and died in November 2025.
The 50th Anniversary celebration was dedicated to his memory.
Read the full memorial minute → Read Kenyon's tribute →Tim’s voice is gone now, but it lives on in the questions we learned to ask and the conversations we continue.
Katherine Elkins · Memorial Minute for Timothy Baker Shutt
In its 50th year, Humane Studies is taking its conversations beyond the classroom and beyond Gambier. IPHS students, alumni, faculty, and collaborators are presenting research, convening public conversations, and asking what happens when the oldest questions about human life meet the technologies and institutions shaping the present.
Here is where to find us.
Throughout the year, IPHS brings students, faculty, alumni, and guests into conversations that cross the boundaries between the humanities, social sciences, arts, computing, and public life.
More voices at the tech table. Big questions behind the tools.
As AI and computational methods transform the study of culture, who gets to decide what counts as knowledge, evidence, interpretation, and expertise? This conversation brings perspectives from across the humanities, social sciences, arts, libraries, and computing into a shared discussion of what expertise means in an increasingly computational world.
More than half a century of Humane Studies, marked during Kenyon’s Homecoming weekend with alumni, students, faculty, and friends of the program.
Alumni memories and reflections →What happens to cultural memory when archives meet artificial intelligence? This conversation asks how new technologies are changing preservation, access, interpretation, and the choices communities make about what survives.
Drawing on work across archives, digital humanities, cultural heritage, and AI, the discussion considers not simply what technology can recover, but who decides what should be preserved and how cultural knowledge should travel into the future.
Related work: Archival Intelligence →What can an interdisciplinary liberal-arts education make possible in a rapidly changing technological world? IPHS alumni and guests discuss routes from the liberal arts into work involving artificial intelligence, technology, data, research, and emerging fields.
The conversation focuses not on a single career pipeline, but on the intellectual habits that travel: learning across disciplines, asking good questions, communicating across fields, understanding people and institutions, and approaching new technologies critically and creatively.
Additional conversations, visiting speakers, and exchanges will be announced throughout the year, bringing together the arts, humanities, social sciences, technology, and public life around the questions Humane Studies has always asked: what it means to be human, what makes a life worth living, and what makes a good society.
Work developed through Humane Studies is traveling this year to research gatherings and public conversations in the United States and abroad.
IPHS faculty Katherine Elkins and Jon Chun join fellow Humanities and Artificial Intelligence awardees in London for the Schmidt Sciences convening, representing work on Archival Intelligence and the use of AI for cultural heritage, archives, and endangered collections.
Explore Archival Intelligence →Marisol Brito, Melissa Vu, and Nic Pechon-Elkins bring research developed through Humane Studies to Iowa State for TSLL 2026.
Their work asks how constructed AI agents use language, perform identity and social roles, and reproduce or transform the cultural assumptions embedded in human communication.
Current IPHS students bring their work to the University of Michigan’s 2026 AI Symposium, extending research begun in Humane Studies into a wider interdisciplinary AI community.
Katherine Elkins delivers a keynote at the University of Michigan’s 2026 Data Science and AI Summit, bringing questions from Humane Studies and human-centered AI into a major interdisciplinary gathering on data science and artificial intelligence.
The program was built on teaching in pairs, across disciplines. Evans and Shutt taught Athens and Sparta. Evans and Elkins taught Modernism, and Elkins later took over Postmodernism from Michael Brint, who also directed the program.
Across five decades IPHS has drawn teachers from every corner of the College, including Sarah Blick. The sciences were always part of the conversation. Physicist Tim Sullivan taught Atoms and the Void, and Ben Schumacher, the quantum physicist who coined the term “qubit,” taught Galileo to Einstein.
Lisa Leibowitz came to the program in 2014 and still teaches in Odyssey and the Aristophanes course. Kelly Fleming, now at the University of Virginia, and Daniel Epstein have carried Odyssey in recent years. If a teacher who mattered to you is missing from this page, we want to hear about it.
44 years · Retired in 2009
Co-founder of IPHS in 1975; taught history and Humane Studies. Kenyon records 44 years of teaching, ending in 2009.
Faculty record →1986–2021 · Kenyon faculty
Taught in IPHS and directed the program; Kenyon’s teaching-award record identifies him with IPHS in 1993.
Faculty record →
1998 · IPHS teaching award
Former director and associate professor of Humane Studies at Kenyon. The 1998 teaching-award record documents his IPHS affiliation.
Faculty record →1974 · Program conceived
Co-conceived IPHS in 1974 and later directed it. Taught Human Predicament in Nature, Human Predicament in History, and Freedom and Responsibility in the Modern World.
Faculty record →1975 · Moved to IPHS
Kenyon’s Religious Studies faculty chronology records his move to IPHS in 1975, after joining Kenyon in 1960.
Faculty record →IPHS teaching has long traveled beyond the classroom. Tim Shutt recorded courses for Recorded Books' Modern Scholar series, from Dante and C.S. Lewis to the wars that shaped the West, and his six-part Odyssey of the West brought the sweep of the program's first-year course to a national audience. Kenyon colleagues joined him along the way, with Fred Baumann and Joel Richeimer on the Enlightenment volume and Richeimer and Katherine Elkins on the final volume, The Twentieth Century. Find them on audible.com or at your local library.
Were you in the program in the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, or 2000s? Tell us about a memory, an experience: a professor, a seminar, an argument that stayed with you.
Share a memory →The Integrated Program in Humane Studies (IPHS) is an interdisciplinary program at Kenyon College, founded in 1975. From Robert Goodhand’s original courses on the human predicament in nature and history and on freedom and responsibility, IPHS has asked three connected questions: What is our nature and what do we need to flourish? How has history shaped us? Given those conditions, what can we become and what ought we create?
In 2016, IPHS launched the AI CoLab, the first interdisciplinary, humanities-led AI program built with partners across academia, industry, government, and the nonprofit world, and the anchor of the world's first human-centered AI curriculum. Its student work lives at Digital Kenyon, where, by the repository's counts, it has been downloaded more than 135,000 times in 198 countries since 2016.
IPHS faculty include Katherine Elkins, Professor of Comparative Literature and Humanities; Jon Chun, Visiting Instructor of Humanities in the Integrated Program in Humane Studies; and Lisa Leibowitz, Assistant Professor of Political Science.
Collaborators · Funders · Press