The program’s contemporary work grows from established scholarship in literature, philosophy, political thought, history, and the study of culture.
Katherine Elkins has published on Plato, Kafka, Proust, Wordsworth, narrative, consciousness, and interpretation. Her work has appeared with Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, Johns Hopkins University Press, Springer, MLN, Philosophy and Literature, and other leading presses and journals.
Lisa Leibowitz works in ancient and modern political philosophy, classical literature, human nature, and the relationship between philosophy, poetry, and political life. Alex Novikoff’s scholarship examines medieval intellectual and cultural history, education, traditions of debate, and relations among Jewish, Christian, and Muslim communities.
These fields are not preliminary decoration for the AI curriculum. They supply the knowledge of language, history, culture, institutions, and judgment on which human-centered AI depends.
In 2023, Jon Chun and Katherine Elkins published “The Crisis of Artificial Intelligence: A New Digital Humanities Curriculum for Human-Centred AI,” the first peer-reviewed account of the curriculum they had begun developing in IPHS in 2016.
The article asks what students in the humanities and social sciences need in order to participate fully in AI research—not simply to observe it from the outside. Its answer is a demanding one. Students need enough programming, statistics, and machine learning to conduct original research. They also need the historical, interpretive, political, ethical, and cultural knowledge required to ask good questions and understand the answers.
The article has now been cited approximately 80 times across artificial intelligence, education, information science, digital humanities, and related fields. That reception suggests that the educational problem IPHS recognized early is now being felt much more widely.
Read the article →Research developed through the program has found readers in technical, humanistic, and social-scientific fields. It has been published and presented through ICML, CoNLL/ACL, Frontiers in Computer Science, the International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing, Poetics Today, PMLA, Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, Johns Hopkins University Press, and Springer.
The computational work has been judged by researchers in artificial intelligence and computational linguistics. The interpretive work has been judged by scholars of literature, philosophy, language, and culture. Research on behavior, ethics, regulation, law, and institutions reaches into the social sciences and public policy.
The work belongs in these different settings because the questions themselves cross their boundaries.
Debating the system of values we wish these tools to align with is the first step.Tanya Klowden & Terence Tao, Fields Medalist
The human-centered AI curriculum at Kenyon encompassed the true essence of a liberal arts education: using a wide range of academic disciplines to discuss world-changing contemporary issues.Raul Romero · Kenyon Class of 2022
At least nine university courses across seven countries now assign work developed through IPHS. None of these adoptions was solicited.
Harvard’s Comparative Literature program teaches a chapter of The Shapes of Stories. Edinburgh assigns the GPT-3 paper in a postgraduate computational text-analysis course. The University of Gothenburg teaches “AI Comes for the Author” in Applied Information Technology. Related work appears in courses in philosophy, literature, narrative studies, English, translation studies, and interdisciplinary AI at McGill, Seoul National University, the University of Santiago de Compostela, Western Illinois University, and elsewhere. A German translation seminar built a classroom exercise around the translation research.
These instructors have found different uses for the work, but they are responding to a shared problem: artificial intelligence is changing language, narrative, authorship, interpretation, and judgment. Its study therefore belongs wherever those subjects are taken seriously—whether in literature, philosophy, translation studies, applied information technology, computational text analysis, or an interdisciplinary institute.
The international reach began before the human-centered AI curriculum.
The Odyssey of the West, a six-part Modern Scholar lecture series, brought together IPHS faculty and colleagues across literature, philosophy, history, political thought, religion, and the arts. Distributed through Audible and library platforms, it has reached listeners around the world.
Katherine Elkins’s Modern Scholar courses on the modern novel and French literature continued that work for a broad public audience. Emails from listeners across countries and continents provide a living record of the program’s reach.
The recorded lectures and the newer international course adoptions belong to the same history: an established humane-studies tradition finding new audiences, first through public teaching and now through a human-centered AI curriculum increasingly used by other universities.
Were you in the program in the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, or 2000s? Help us complete the record.
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