The weekend is dedicated to the memory of Tim Shutt. In Memoriam →
This fall, we're celebrating over half a century of Humane Studies — and we'd love for you to come back to the Hill to mark it with us. We're building a weekend around doing, showing, and reconnecting rather than sitting and listening.
If you took IPHS, this is still your program. It still asks the questions you wrestled with. It has new tools, new students, and the same conviction.
An evening conversation marking the occasion. Speakers and details to be announced — join the mailing list below.
Pull up a chair in a real IPHS seminar. Three sessions run side by side — pick one:
Alumni from the program's last decade stand beside the research they did as students, from sentiment maps of novels to audits of language models to simulations of courtrooms, and talk about where it led. The work still lives on Digital Kenyon. Drop in and circulate.
An evening to reconnect — organized by what you do now rather than the year you graduated, so a 1979 grad and a 2019 grad working on the same questions actually find each other. Connect with alumni across all fifty years, not just your own.
We're still finalizing speakers, times, and locations. Drop your details and we'll send the full schedule as soon as it's set, along with the invitation to the Find Your Field reception for IPHS alumni.
The recent decades are well recorded because student work is published and timestamped on Digital Kenyon. The earlier decades live in memory, and we need your help to write them down.
Michael Evans, with co-founders Robert Goodhand and Richard Hettlinger, launches the Integrated Program in Humane Studies. It becomes Kenyon's oldest interdisciplinary program.
Decades of seminars, tutorials, and the Odyssey sequence. If you were there, this is your part of the record.
Send us a milestone →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.
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.
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).
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 100,000, reaching more than 4,000 institutions in 198 countries. IPHS marks fifty years at Homecoming, September 25–26.
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, among them Sarah Blick, Wendy Singer, Adam Serfass, Timothy Spiekerman, and Jason Waller. 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 the Odyssey sequence and the Aristophanes course. Kelly Fleming, now at the University of Virginia, and Daniel Epstein have carried the Odyssey sequence in recent years. If a teacher who mattered to you is missing from this page, we want to hear about it.
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. Write to us, or bring it to the poster walk at Homecoming, September 25–26.
Share a memory →