What it means to be human. What makes a life worth living. What makes a good society. Over half a century of asking, at Kenyon — now in conversation with the machines we have made.
Built in a small village in Ohio. Read in more countries than the UN has members.
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, 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 humanities are part of humane studies. They are not the whole of it.
The inquiry is older than any department, and the methods we use are whatever the work requires.
For half a century, IPHS has been Kenyon's home for that conviction.
Engaged in NIST's federal AI-standards consortium (CAISI) through the Modern Language Association. LLM evaluation, red-teaming, ethical auditing, and comparative global AI regulation.
Multi-agent behavioral simulation, affective AI, and narrative analysis. Empirical methods applied to judicial, medical, and social decision-making.
Schmidt Sciences-funded work rescuing endangered archives. Community-governed data sovereignty. AI for multilingual cultural preservation.
In 2016, IPHS launched the AI CoLab — what appears to be the first interdisciplinary, humanities-led AI program, built in deep collaboration with partners across academia, industry, government, and the nonprofit world. Students bring the integrated tradition to AI from inside, not as an afterthought. It anchors what Kenyon calls the world's first human-centered AI curriculum. Their work lives at Digital Kenyon, where, by the repository's own counts, it has been downloaded more than 100,000 times by readers in 198 countries since 2016.
A small faculty teaches the whole arc — from the origins of philosophy to the frontier of AI — alongside the students doing the work.
Works on human-centered AI, AI safety, and the place of literature and the humanities in a computational age.
Research site →Works on AI safety, LLM evaluation, and computational social science.
Research site →A political scientist who teaches the program's seminar on Plato and the Odyssey.
Kenyon profile →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
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 — work that lives on Digital Kenyon — and talk about where it led. 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 Integrated Program in Humane Studies (IPHS) is an interdisciplinary program at Kenyon College, founded in 1975. It returns to an older, wider conversation — asking what it means to be human, what makes a life worth living, and what makes a good society — now in conversation with the machines we have made.
In 2016, IPHS launched the AI CoLab — what appears to be the first interdisciplinary, humanities-led AI program built with partners across academia, industry, government, and the nonprofit world, and what Kenyon calls the world's first human-centered AI curriculum. Its student work lives at Digital Kenyon, where, by the repository's counts, it has been downloaded more than 100,000 times in 198 countries since 2016.
IPHS marks over half a century during Kenyon College Homecoming weekend, September 25–26, 2026 — with seminars open to campus, an alumni poster walk, a featured conversation, and a reception for alumni and friends of the program.
IPHS faculty include Katherine Elkins, Professor of Humanities; Jon Chun, Visiting Professor in the Integrated Program in Humane Studies; and Lisa Leibowitz, Assistant Professor of Political Science.