Integrated Program in Humane Studies

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Founded in 1975, the Integrated Program in Humane Studies is Kenyon's oldest interdisciplinary program. It began with three questions that still animate its core curriculum: What is human nature? What has history bequeathed us? Given all this, how ought we to live and what should we create? IPHS brings those questions into a single conversation rather than leaving them to a single department.

IPHS's yearlong Odyssey is the first-year gateway to Kenyon's distinctive core curriculum. It still works the way few courses anywhere do: students read from Homer and Plato through Dante, Shakespeare, Darwin and Marx, with lectures from faculty across the College. A seminar of fifteen and tutorials where each student defends a short paper in person. The program teaches students to find the questions that need to be asked, not just to answer the ones others are already asking.

Programming Humanity asks the program's three founding questions again in a world of data, algorithms, and AI systems that model, predict, write, and decide. The intermediate and advanced IPHS core courses return to them in new forms, providing the historical, interpretive, social-scientific, and technical framework needed to understand the systems that shape human life today — and to decide what we should create next.

Those questions carry new weight now that we live among machines that write, argue, and decide. In 2016, IPHS faculty Kate Elkins and Jon Chun created the world’s first human-centered AI curriculum and founded the AI CoLab, built on a conviction the program had held for forty years: the questions come before the code.

Today, students pursue those questions with whatever methods they require. Raul Romero '22 used 316,141 tweets from Venezuelan opposition leaders to study fracture within a democratic movement. Marisol Hernandez Brito '26 tested 50 AI-generated thriller outlines to investigate why models converge on familiar narrative structures. Adrian Mangine '26 built readder, an evidence-informed speed-reading tool for students with ADHD and convergence insufficiency. 

The work is recognized well beyond Gambier. Schmidt Sciences funds faculty trying to rescue disappearing archives using AI. Faculty lead the Modern Language Association team at the U.S. AI Safety Institute Consortium. OpenAI, UNESCO and the IBM/Notre Dame Tech Ethics Lab have each sought the program out, and Forbes profiled it as a model for human-centered AI education. When Fields Medalist Terence Tao and Tanya Klowden wrote about AI and the future of mathematical thought, they cited Elkins and Chun’s 2023 article on what AI demands of us: an understanding of the nature of knowledge, beauty, meaning and morality.

IPHS at 50

At IPHS's 50th anniversary celebration, Venezuelan democracy leader and IPHS concentrator Leopoldo López '93 H'07 reflected on the way questions of justice, fair trail, and free speech became urgently real during his trial and imprisonment. In his TED Talk, How to use tech to outsmart dictators, he asks how open, decentralized technologies might put power in the hands of ordinary people.

News and Announcements

George Layburn Commitment

George Layburn '79 has made a new estate commitment to Kenyon that will strengthen the George Layburn Endowed Scholarship and establish an endowed professorship in IPHS honoring his mother, Shirley Dinsdale. Layburn credits IPHS seminars and tutorial with helping shape the confidence and skills he carried into his career.

AI CoLab Fellows at TSLL

IPHS alumni Marisol Hernandez Brito and Melissa Vu, together with AI CoLab Research Fellow Nic Pechon-Elkins, presented at Iowa State University's Joint 2026 CEAH Symposium and 23rd Technology for Second Language Learning Conference, October 15-16, 2026. Their panel, "What Constructed Agents Sound Like: Language, Pragmatics, and Culture in Human-AI Interaction," examines how AI agents navigate cultural context, historical register, and socially meaningful forms of address in Spanish and Vietnamese.

Individual presentations:

• Marisol Hernandez Brito: Constructing the Agent in Spanish: How AI Models Imagine Artificial Intelligence in Latin American Contexts
• Nic Pechon-Elkins: What AI Makes of Sancho Panza: Pragmatic Competence and Historical Register in AI Language Progressing
• Melissa Vu: What AI Calls You: Social Deixis, Pronoun Systems, and the Limits of AI Agents in Vietnamese

Five IPHS Concentrators at Michigan

Five current IPHS concentrators will present research alongside industry and academic researchers at the University of Michigan AI Symposium, Foundational Models: From Academia to Industry to Society, on Oct. 20, 2026, in Ann Arbor.