Timberlake House
Friday Night Drinks
Informal drinks and conversation for IPHS alumni and friends at Timberlake House.
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.
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.
Informal drinks and conversation for IPHS alumni and friends at Timberlake House.
These two Back to Class sessions run consecutively. Alumni and friends are welcome to attend both: one at the frontier of AI, then one returning to an ancient question.
Professors Katherine Elkins and Jon Chun
Timberlake
Professor Lisa Leibowitz
Timberlake
Browse a selection of IPHS student and alumni work in the Archon Hall lobby before the featured conversation.
Leopoldo López ’93 H’07 in conversation with Raul Romero ’22
When Leopoldo López was held in solitary confinement in a Venezuelan military prison, his captors realized how much strength and focus he drew from his books. So, they confiscated his library and placed it in a neighboring cell where he could see his books, but not reach them. He kept writing.
In 1989 he arrived in Gambier and graduated from Kenyon in 1993 with honors in sociology, receiving both the George Herbert Mead Award in sociology and the Richard F. Hettlinger Award for excellence in IPHS.
Three decades later, Raul Romero ’22 discovered Kenyon while searching for López’s biography during an internship at a Caracas-area city council office. At Kenyon, he went on to win the Leopoldo López Student Award.
Fifty years into Kenyon’s Humane Studies program, López and Romero sit down together to ask what an education like Kenyon’s is for, and why the humane study of ideas and human experience matters even more when the state itself turns inhumane.
Presented by the Integrated Program in Humane Studies, celebrating 50 years of Humane Studies at Kenyon, with support from the Kenyon Campus Community Development Fund (KCCDF).
The social conclusion of the day for IPHS alumni, students, faculty and friends. After the 4 p.m. talk in Archon Hall, walk over to Gund Gallery for the reception.
Several alumni have offered to mentor current students. Depending on interest, we may also organize a short speed-mentoring/networking opportunity during Homecoming weekend.
Across the year, IPHS brings arts, humanities, and social sciences into conversation around Digital Humanities and human-centered AI.
Tell us which parts of the celebration you hope to attend, and we’ll keep you posted as locations and remaining details are confirmed.
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 125,000, reaching more than 4,000 institutions in 198 countries. IPHS 50th Anniversary events take place during Homecoming weekend, 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 with you at Homecoming, September 25–26.
Share a memory →