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.
The questions are older than the departments.
Read more →Whatever helps us ask the question — AI safety, computational social science, archival AI, and what students build.
Read more →The faculty asking with students — from the origins of philosophy to the frontier of AI.
Read more →Cited by a Fields Medalist; remembered by alumni.
Read more →Over half a century, marked at Homecoming weekend, September 25–26, 2026 — with the full fifty-year timeline.
Read more →Were you in the program in the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, or 2000s? Help us complete the record.
Share a memory →
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.
This year's celebration is dedicated to his memory.
Read Kenyon's tribute →The Integrated Program in Humane Studies (IPHS) is an interdisciplinary program at Kenyon College, founded in 1975. It returns to an older, wider conversation — asking what it means to be human, what makes a life worth living, and what makes a good society — now in conversation with the machines we have made.
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 100,000 times in 198 countries since 2016.
IPHS marks over half a century during Kenyon College Homecoming weekend, September 25–26, 2026 — with two seminars and a reception for alumni and friends of the program.
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.