Michael Evans
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 →The people
The faculty asking with students.
A small faculty teaches the whole arc — from the origins of philosophy to the frontier of AI — alongside the students doing the work.
Katherine Elkins
Professor of Comparative Literature and Humanities
Katherine Elkins’s work begins with literature and the history of ideas. She has written about Plato, Kafka, Proust, Wordsworth, narrative, consciousness, and interpretation, with scholarship published by Cambridge, Oxford, Johns Hopkins, Springer, and leading journals.
Her computational research grew from those interests and now includes narrative and emotion, human judgment, model behavior, agents, persuasion, cultural memory, AI safety, and governance. She co-founded Kenyon’s human-centered AI curriculum and AI CoLab with Jon Chun in 2016.
Jon Chun
Visiting Instructor of Humanities, Integrated Program in Humane Studies
Jon Chun is co-principal investigator of the Archival Intelligence project. He works across machine learning, natural-language processing, narrative similarity, affective computing, computational social science, model evaluation, and AI safety. His research has appeared through ICML, CoNLL/ACL, Frontiers in Computer Science, and interdisciplinary humanities venues.
Before coming to higher education, he worked in software and technology, co-founded a company later acquired by Symantec, and contributed to patented technological systems. He co-founded Kenyon’s human-centered AI curriculum and AI CoLab with Katherine Elkins in 2016.
Lisa Leibowitz
Assistant Professor of Political Science
Lisa Leibowitz is a scholar of ancient and modern political philosophy, classical literature, human nature, and the relationship between philosophy, poetry, and political life. She has taught in Odyssey and in the program’s Aristophanes course since 2014, bringing questions of judgment, freedom, power, and collective life into the continuing work of Humane Studies.
Kenyon profile →Fifty years of teachers came before us. Meet them →
Fifty years of teachers
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.
Tim Shutt
1986–2021 · Kenyon faculty
Taught in IPHS and directed the program; Kenyon’s teaching-award record identifies him with IPHS in 1993.
Faculty record →
Michael Brint
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 →Robert Goodhand
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 →Richard Hettlinger
1975 · Moved to IPHS
Kenyon’s Religious Studies faculty chronology records his move to IPHS in 1975, after joining Kenyon in 1960.
Faculty record →