Long before the modern research university divided knowledge into departments, scholars across many cultures asked integrated questions about what it means to be human and how to live a life worth living.
The inquiry is older than any university and broader than any single tradition. Humane studies returns to that older, wider conversation and asks it again with the methods and pressures of the present. Today, that includes the question of what it means to be human in a world we share with the machines we have made.
Fifty years ago, Kenyon faculty member Michael Evans had an idea: a program built on something older than the modern humanities — the conviction that the biggest questions about being human don't belong to any single discipline. Founded in 1975 with co-founders Robert Goodhand and Richard Hettlinger, IPHS became Kenyon's oldest interdisciplinary program, and remains one of the few anywhere to trace the whole arc of human thought in a single sequence — from Homer and the origins of philosophy to the foundations of computer science and the frontier of AI.
Half a century later, it's still asking the same questions — now in conversation with the machines we have made.
The full timeline →