Kenyon College
Integrated Program in Humane Studies
AI, Humanities, and Society
AI grounded in humanistic inquiry — by the numbers. The world's first human-centered AI curriculum, in its second decade. Built for liberal arts students. No coding background required. We teach students to use AI to investigate the things they already care about — the questions philosophy, history, literature, and the arts have always asked.
Where IPHS Graduates Go: Harvard Law · National Gallery of Art · UC Berkeley (PhD) · eBay AI · startups in South Asia · finance · consulting · government
The AI CoLab — The questions that define us, the tools that are changing us.
- The traditional Liberal Arts are the foundation. AI is the frontier. Humanistic inquiry — meaning, purpose, evaluation, governance — drives every research question we take up.
- The Integrated Program in Humane Studies (IPHS) is grounded in the great books, global intellectual history, and the enduring question of human thriving.
- The gateway course, IPHS 111Y-112Y, Odyssey, is a year-long encounter with the texts and ideas that shaped civilization, from Homer and Plato to Fanon and Beauvoir, from the Bhagavad Gita to the scientific revolution, taught by up to 30 Kenyon faculty. It trains students to think across disciplines, integrate disparate perspectives, and ask the questions that give technology meaning.
- Our students bring fifty years of humanistic inquiry to the most powerful technology ever created — and use it to investigate the questions humanists have always cared about.
Major 2025–26 Interdisciplinary Collaborations Across Academia, Industry, Government and Non-Profits:
Schmidt Sciences
Humanities AI Virtual Institute (HAVI)
Grant Recipient (top 2% worldwide)
NIST
Center for AI Standards and Innovation
(U.S. AI Safety Institute)
50 Years
Interdisciplinary Inquiry
10 Years
Human-Centered AI Research
into the Big Questions
into the Big Questions
~100,000
Research Project Downloads Worldwide
Global Impact
IPHS student research downloaded by 500+ institutions across over 200 countries and territories
Top download sites include Stanford · MIT · Oxford · Berkeley · Amazon · Princeton · CMU · Columbia · NTU Singapore · Microsoft · Cambridge · NYU · Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (Portuguese NSF) · Chinese Academy of Social Sciences
‘The human-centered AI curriculum at Kenyon encompassed the true essence of a liberal arts education: using a wide range of academic disciplines and approaches to discuss world-changing contemporary issues and create meaningful conclusions.’Raul Romero, Class of 2022
‘By approaching the topic from a multidisciplinary, humanist, perspective that considers philosophy and history and linguistics as well as the tech, I feel more prepared to debate and contemplate this total proliferation of AI in the discourse. I am hopeful that this kind of introduction to AI makes people more inclined to use these tools for curiosity and good rather than for profits and political domination!’Frederika Pfeiffer, Class of 2022
What Our Students Investigate
Rescuing Endangered Heritage
Using AI to preserve New Orleans jazz archives before they're lost
The Emotional Shape of Novels
Sentiment analysis mapping the arc of feeling across centuries of fiction
Political Discourse at Scale
Analyzing 316,000 tweets to test theories about democratic conversation
AI & Human Identity
Testing whether AI can pass validated measures of emotional intelligence — and what it means if it can
Surveillance Capitalism
Investigating Instagram's terms of service through critical theory
AI Safety and AI Global Governance
Human-AI alignment, AI safety audits, AI persuasion-manipulation-deception benchmarks, international AI regulatory policy across the EU, China, and United States
The Curriculum
IPHS 111Y–112Y
Odyssey: Pursuit of Wisdom and Understanding. A year-long journey through the ideas that shaped civilization — from Homer and Plato through scientific revolutions to modern thought. Up to 30 Kenyon faculty lecture on their areas of expertise. Students learn to think across disciplines and to recognize which questions about technology are genuinely new and which are very old. This is the foundation for everything that follows.
IPHS 300
AI for Humanity: Build and evaluate AI systems from statistical ML to LLMs paired with philosophy, ethics, and critical theory. This is the first course of its kind in the world.
IPHS 200
Programming Humanity: from programming to data viz to networks to analyze literary texts, social networks, and human behavior using universal best practices.
IPHS 400
Frontiers of AI: Learn multi-agent systems, automated knowledge work, and state-of-the-art AI research tools, methods, and authorship.
IPHS 484
Senior Research Seminar: Create your own novel interdisciplinary research capstone project that reflects your studies, passions, and future goals with real-world impact.