Katherine Elkins

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Katherine Elkins is professor of humanities and comparative literature and faculty in Computing at Kenyon College.

Contents

Early life

Elkins attended Yale as an undergraduate, then completed a Ph.D. at UC Berkeley. She is the niece of Henry Elkins.[ citation needed ]

Teaching

Elkins is a professor of comparative literature and humanities in the Integrated Program for Humane Studies (IPHS) [1] and faculty in Computing [2] at Kenyon College. She is a founding co-director of the KDH lab [3] and co-created the first human-centered artificial intelligence [4] curriculum launched in 2016 at Kenyon College [5] as the director of IPHS. Her computational humanities research has produced methodologies that have been replicated across hundreds of projects, with outputs downloaded over 90,000 times from 4,000+ institutions worldwide as of November 2025. [6] Her recorded lectures with The Modern Scholar on The Modern Novel [7] (2021) and The Giants of French Literature [8] (2020) are tailored to broader public audiences via Amazon's Audible.com. [9] She was nominated by graduating seniors to give the Kenyon College's December 2024 Baccalaureate Address which revisited David Foster Wallace's famous 2005 "This is Water" Kenyon graduation speech. [10] In November 2025, Forbes featured the human-centered AI curriculum and research-focused AI Colab that Elkins co-founded with Jon Chun in 2016 within the Integrated Program for Humane Studies at Kenyon College. [11] [12]

Research

Elkins is best known for her pioneering work on interdisciplinary artificial intelligence in literature, narrative, affective computing and the ethics of AI. Her book The Shapes of Stories, published by Cambridge University Press in 2022, [13] provided a comprehensive methodology for using diachronic sentiment analysis to analyze the emotional aspects of plot across dozens of literary classics using SentimentArcs. [14] This method has been used to analyze narrative in diverse forms including literature, [15] translations, [16] TV scripts, [17] end of life medical narratives, [18] and the evolution of social media narratives for elections [19] and economic crisis. [20]

Elkins was among the first scholars to analyze GPT-3's capabilities for creative writing. Her September 2020 paper 'Can GPT-3 Pass a Writer's Turing Test?' (co-authored with Jon Chun) -- published just four months after the model's release—was archived on gwern.net, a selective technical repository documenting AI development that is consulted by researchers at organizations including OpenAI and DeepMind. [21] [22] Her computational methodologies have been replicated in multiple studies archived alongside her work.

Elkins' research addresses fundamental questions about information processing and transformation across different systems. Her work spans from analyzing how consciousness processes embodied information (Proust scholarship) to developing computational methods for preserving information in degraded cultural archives, identifying how AI systems process information differently than humans (syntactic framing vulnerabilities), and shaping governance frameworks for high-stakes decision-making. This includes analysis of how information transforms across languages, cultures, and media types, with consistent attention to what information is lost or preserved in each transformation.

She presented the first transdisciplinary AI research at leading academic conferences including the Modernist Studies Association in October 2019, [23] The International Society for the Study of Narrative in March 2020 [24] and the Modern Language Association Conference in January 2021. [25] Elkins was an early advocate for incorporating AI in literary studies with co-authored essays in The Journal of Cultural Analytics in September 2020 [26] and Narrative in January 2021. [27] More recently she focused on how AI redefines writing, [28] creativity, [29] authorship, [30] translations of literature, [31] eXplainable AI, [32] and the future of the academia in leading journals like Poetics Today . [33] Her article "A(I) University in Ruins: What Remains in a World with Large Language Models?" in the Proceedings of the Modern Language Association addresses how AI may fundamentally redefine traditional academic disciplines. [34] Her collaborative position paper addressing the risks and benefits of open-source AI was selected for oral presentation at ICML in July 2024. [35]

Elkins traditional scholarship includes essays on Plato, [36] Virginia Woolf, [37] Franz Kafka, [38] Marcel Proust, [39] and William Wordsworth. [40] In 2001 she won the A. Owen Aldridge Prize [41] in Comparative Literature for an essay on Charles Baudelaire. [41] She edited Philosophical Approaches to Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, which brings together essays by leading international Proust scholars, with Oxford University Press in 2022. [42] Her 2025 human-centered AI scholarship includes "Beyond Plot: How Sentiment Analysis Reshapes Our Understanding of Narrative Structure" in the Journal of Cultural Analytics, [43] "The Shapes of Cinderella: Emotional Architecture and the Language of Moral Difference" in the journal Humanities, [44] and ""If Open Source is to Win, It Must Go Public" as a Spotlight talk at ICML 2025 CodeML Workshop. [45]

In December 2025, Elkins and her co-lead Jon Chun were awarded a grant of up to $330,000 from Schmidt Sciences as part of the Humanities and AI Virtual Institute (HAVI) for their project "Archival Intelligence: Rescuing New Orleans’ Endangered Cultural Legacy." [46] One of only 23 such awards granted globally and totaling $11 million across all recipients, the 18-month initiative develops free, open-access AI tools to preserve and restore endangered materials in small community archives using smartphone photography, with a pilot focus on multilingual newspapers documenting Creole and Cajun communities, as well as early jazz artifacts in New Orleans, while addressing "cultural flattening" in AI models for multicultural and multimodal historical data. [47] [48]

Speaking

Elkins is one of the leading women speaking widely on interdisciplinary AI. As early as 2019, she publicly advocated integrating AI into traditional humanities curriculum with a keynote address at the Ohio State University. [49] She gave the Meredith-Donovan lecture at Mount Saint Mary's University in 2023, [50] featured AI Working Group lecture at Wofford College, [51] and presentation at the Stories that Win Symposium at Washington University in 2024. [52] Elkins gives keynotes on the intersection of AI, digital humanities, education, and the future of work. Most recently, in the summer-fall of 2024, these included keynotes at Carleton College's Day of Digital Humanities, [53] Lafayette College AI Literacy Across the Curriculum, [54] and Austin College's A.J. Carlson Lecture. [55]

Elkins speaks on a wide range of AI topics to diverse audiences both within the US and internationally. In February 2025 she was a featured speaker on "How agentic behavior, reasoning, and emotional intelligence upend previous notions of human exceptionalism" for the Khan Institute at Smith College which supports interdisciplinary research. [56] That same month, she was the keynote for domestic and global public engaged action research [57] hosted by Global Lab for the Global School at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Elkins spoke on the connections between AI ethics, regulation, and interdisciplinary human-centered AI research [58] at Rally Innovation 2025, a global cross-sector innovation conference that convenes visionary leaders, investors, entrepreneurs, educators, and other stakeholders. [59] In October 2025, Elkins presented "The Power of Connection: Leveraging Technology for Humanistic Medical Education" [60] for continuing medical education credits in Doha for Weill Cornell Medicine-Qatar. Also in October 2025, she was a featured speaker for the Education Guild in the OpenAI Forum [61] in San Francisco, CA.

Elkins has been a panelist on interdisciplinary AI conversations with thought leaders from diverse fields. She discussed language, epistemology and the ethics of AI with Ned Block, Francesca Rossi, and Dennis Yi Tenen [62] in October 2022. [63] Elkins debated AI generative art with co-panelist Boris Eldagsen (winner [64] of Sony World Photography Award 2023) and Shane Balkowitsch on Al Jazeera in April 2023. [65] She presented her perspectives on emotions at the intersection of AI and literature with experts Rosalind Picard, Joseph LeDoux, and Mabel Berezin. [66] She discussed what gets lost in machine translation on the podcast Merging Minds. [67]

She is the AI industry expert for Bloomberg's new AI Strategy Course [68] launched 2024. She serves as CAIO [69] of HumanCentricLabs [70] emphasizing humane applications of AI in the workplace. In December 2025, Elkins co-hosted an OpenAI forum on "AI and Academic Research" with Kevin Weil (VP of OpenAI for Science) and two other researchers in interdisciplinary human-centered AI including Leonardo Impett. [71] [72] [73]

AI Safety and AI Regulation

In March 2024, Elkins was named a principal investigator in the U.S. AI Safety Institute Consortium, established by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) under Presidential Executive Order 14110. In June 2025, the consortium was renamed the U.S. Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI), where she continues her safety research. [74] She participates on behalf of the Modern Language Association (MLA), representing the organization and its 25,000 members as part of the inaugural safety research teams drawn from industry, academia, government, and non-profit sectors. [75]

Elkins co-authors research on AI governance and regulation. A position paper on international AI regulation, developed with international collaborators from institutions including the University of Oxford, ITS Rio (Brazil), UC Berkeley, Luxembourg IST, National University Philippines, Bocconi University,  Tecnológico de Monterrey (Mexico), and others was selected for an oral presentation at the 2024 International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML). [76] This work received support from META, and Elkins has been a member of META Open Innovation AI Research Community since 2023, and presented at the 2024 Conference at Meta's London Office. [77] [78] [79] She also co-authored a comparative paper on AI regulatory frameworks in the United States, European Union, and China with the Oxford Witt Lab in 2025. [80] [81] With the organization PublicAI, she co-authored a piece arguing that open-source AI must be supplemented by public infrastructure to ensure models are accessible and governed in the public interest. [82]

Her work in applied AI ethics includes a project with the Notre Dame-IBM Tech Ethics Lab, which awarded her a grant for research into multi-agent court simulations for predicting juvenile recidivism. [83] In January 2025, Elkins presented the findings from this grant-funded research at the University of Notre Dame. [1]

References

  1. 1 2 "Katherine Elkins". Kenyon College. Retrieved 2024-07-13.
  2. ↑ "Computing Faculty". Kenyon College. Retrieved 2024-07-13.
  3. ↑ "{K}DH Colab & Research Fellows". Kenyon College. Retrieved 2024-07-13.
  4. ↑ Chun, Jon; Elkins, Katherine (October 2023). "The Crisis of Artificial Intelligence: A New Digital Humanities Curriculum for Human-Centred AI" . International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing. 17 (2): 147–167. doi:10.3366/ijhac.2023.0310 . Retrieved 13 July 2023.
  5. ↑ Chun, Jon; Elkins, Katherine (2023-10-16). "The Evolution of AI". euppublishingblog.com. Edinburgh University Press . Retrieved 2024-07-11.
  6. ↑ "Digital Humanities projects and coursework at Kenyon College | Kenyon College Research | Digital Kenyon: Research, Scholarship, and Creative Exchange". digital.kenyon.edu. Retrieved 2024-07-13.
  7. ↑ Elkins, Katherine (2013). "The Modern Scholar: The Modern Novel". Audible.com The Modern Scholar Lectures. Retrieved 13 July 2024.
  8. ↑ Elkins, Katherine (2010). "The Modern Scholar: Giants of French Literature Balzac, Flaubert, Proust, and Camus". Audible.com The Modern Scholar Lectures. Retrieved 13 July 2024.
  9. ↑ Prof. Katherine Elkins. "Audible.com Lectures on Tape". Audible.com. Retrieved 12 July 2024.
  10. ↑ "December Senior Recognition Ceremony". Kenyon College. 2024-12-20. Retrieved 2025-02-04.
  11. ↑ Baier, Paul. "Where AI Meets The Humanities: Inside Kenyon College's Bold Experiment". Forbes. Retrieved 2025-12-07.
  12. ↑ Baier, Paul (2025-12-04). "Where AI Meets The Humanities: Inside Kenyon College's Bold Experiment". GAI Insights - Paul Baier. Retrieved 2025-12-07.
  13. ↑ Elkins, Katherine (2022). The Shapes of Stories: Sentiment Analysis for Narrative. Elements in Digital Literary Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN   978-1-009-27039-7.
  14. ↑ Chun, Jon (2021-10-18), SentimentArcs: A Novel Method for Self-Supervised Sentiment Analysis of Time Series Shows SOTA Transformers Can Struggle Finding Narrative Arcs, arXiv: 2110.09454
  15. ↑ Perloff, Catherine (2019-10-01). "Doubles and Reflections: Sentiment Analysis and Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire". IPHS 300: Artificial Intelligence for the Humanities: Text, Image, and Sound.
  16. ↑ Strain, Flannery (2022-10-01). "The Trials of Translation: A Cross-Linguistic Survey of Sentiment Analysis on Franz Kafka's Trial". IPHS 200: Programming Humanity.
  17. ↑ Gow, Alexander (2021-10-01). "Blood in the Water: Storytelling and Sentiment Analysis in ABC's Shark Tank". IPHS 484: Senior Seminar.
  18. ↑ Song, Hemmi (2022-10-01). "On Death and Emotion: Evaluating the Five Stages of Grief in End-of-Life Memoirs Using AI Deep Learning Models". IPHS 484: Senior Seminar.
  19. ↑ Gimbel, Ben (2022-10-01). "Quantifying Polarization around Election Denial: Measuring Public Sentiment Changes in the 2022 Midterms". IPHS 200: Programming Humanity.
  20. ↑ De Silva, Cherantha (2022-10-01). "How Did Sri Lankan Protestors End Up in the President's Pool? Understanding the evolution of an occupy-style protest: A story of economic turmoil, declining social sentiment and resulting political change". IPHS 200: Programming Humanity.
  21. ↑ Elkins, Katherine; Chun, Jon (2020-09-14). "Can GPT-3 Pass a Writer's Turing Test?". Journal of Cultural Analytics. 5 (2). doi:10.22148/001c.17212. ISSN   2371-4549.
  22. ↑ https://gwern.net/doc/ai/poetry/2020-elkins.pdf [ bare URL PDF ]
  23. ↑ "The Modernist Studies Association Annual Conference: Upheaval and Reconstruction" (PDF). Modernist Studies Association 2019 Conference in Toronto, Canada. October 2019.
  24. ↑ "Narrative 2020 Conference Program, March 5-7, 2020 New Orleans" (PDF). Narrative 2020 Conference. March 2020. Retrieved 12 July 2024.
  25. ↑ "Modern Language Conference Website and Schedule". Modern Language Association Conference 2021. Retrieved 12 July 2024.
  26. ↑ Elkins, Katherine; Chun, Jon (2020-09-14). "Can GPT-3 Pass a Writer's Turing Test?". Journal of Cultural Analytics. 5 (2). doi: 10.22148/001c.17212 .
  27. ↑ Chun, Jon; Elkins, Katherine (2022). "What the Rise of AI Means for Narrative Studies: A Response to "Why Computers Will Never Read (or Write) Literature" by Angus Fletcher" . Narrative. 30 (1): 104–113. doi:10.1353/nar.2022.0005. ISSN   1538-974X.
  28. ↑ Elkins, Katherine (2024-06-01). "AI Comes for the Author" . Poetics Today. 45 (2): 267–274. doi:10.1215/03335372-11092884. ISSN   0333-5372.
  29. ↑ "Modern Language Association 2024 Conference". Modern Language Association 2024 Conference. Jan 2024. Retrieved 12 July 2024.
  30. ↑ D’Agostino, Susan. "AI Raises Complicated Questions About Authorship". Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved 2024-07-11.
  31. ↑ Elkins, Katherine (12 August 2024). "In search of a translator: using AI to evaluate what's lost in translation". Frontiers in Computer Science. 6 (2024). doi: 10.3389/fcomp.2024.1444021 .
  32. ↑ Ries, Thorsten; van Dalen-Oskam, Karina; Offert, Fabian (2023-11-01). "Reproducibility and explainability in digital humanities". International Journal of Digital Humanities. 5 (2): 247–251. doi:10.1007/s42803-023-00078-7. ISSN   2524-7840.
  33. ↑ "Volume 45 Issue 2 | Poetics Today | Duke University Press". read.dukeupress.edu. Retrieved 2024-07-11.
  34. ↑ Elkins, Katherine (May 2024). "A(I) University in Ruins: What Remains in a World with Large Language Models?" . PMLA. 139 (3): 559–565. doi:10.1632/S0030812924000543. ISSN   0030-8129.
  35. ↑ "ICML Poster Position: Near to Mid-term Risks and Opportunities of Open-Source Generative AI". icml.cc. Retrieved 2024-07-11.
  36. ↑ Elkins, Katherine (2020). "Naming the Lyric: Literature versus Philosophy in Plato's Symposium" . Philosophy and Literature. 44 (2): 402–417. doi:10.1353/phl.2020.0030. ISSN   1086-329X.
  37. ↑ Elkins, Katherine (2008-12-01). "Memory and Material Significance: Composing Modernist Influence" . Modern Language Quarterly. 69 (4): 509–531. doi:10.1215/00267929-2008-014. ISSN   0026-7929.
  38. ↑ "Project MUSE - MLN-Volume 136, Number 3, April 2021 (German Issue)". muse.jhu.edu. Retrieved 2024-07-11.
  39. ↑ Kattan Gribetz, Sarit; Kaye, Lynn, eds. (2023). "Time: A Multidisciplinary Introduction". Time. De Gruyter Oldenbourg. doi:10.1515/9783110690774. ISBN   978-3-11-069077-4 . Retrieved 2024-07-11.
  40. ↑ Elkins, Katherine (2022), Hagberg, Garry (ed.), "Wordsworth's Literary Sublime" , Fictional Worlds and Philosophical Reflection, Cham: Springer International Publishing, pp. 227–244, doi:10.1007/978-3-030-73061-1_10, ISBN   978-3-030-73061-1 , retrieved 2024-07-11
  41. 1 2 "A. Owen Aldridge Prize". www.acla.org. American Comparative Literature Association. Retrieved 2024-07-13.
  42. ↑ Elkins, Katherine, ed. (2022). "Proust's In Search of Lost Time: Philosophical Perspectives | Oxford Academic" . academic.oup.com. doi:10.1093/oso/9780190921576.001.0001. ISBN   978-0-19-092157-6 . Retrieved 2024-07-11.
  43. ↑ Elkins, Katherine (September 2025). "Beyond Plot: How Sentiment Analysis Reshapes Our Understanding of Narrative Structure". Journal of Cultural Analytics . 10 (3).
  44. ↑ Elkins, Katherine (October 2025). "The Shapes of Cinderella: Emotional Architecture and the Language of Moral Difference". Humanities . 14 (10): https://www.mdpi.com/journal/humanities.
  45. ↑ Tan, Joshua; Vincent, Nicholas; Elkins, Katherine; Sahlgren, Magnus (2025-07-12), If open source is to win, it must go public, arXiv, doi:10.48550/arXiv.2507.09296, arXiv:2507.09296, retrieved 2025-11-17
  46. ↑ Medina, Gabe (2025-12-11). "Schmidt Sciences awards $11M in grants to bring AI to humanities research". Schmidt Sciences. Retrieved 2025-12-12.
  47. ↑ College, Kenyon (2025-12-12). "Kenyon receives $330K gift for AI work that advances the Humanities". Knox Pages - Knox County News & Info. Retrieved 2025-12-12.
  48. ↑ "Kenyon Receives Major Gift for AI Work that Advances the Humanities". Kenyon College. 2025-12-11. Retrieved 2025-12-12.
  49. ↑ ""Programming Humanity" Katherine Elkins (Kenyon College) | Department of Comparative Studies". comparativestudies.osu.edu. Retrieved 2024-07-12.
  50. ↑ "Katherine Elkins Encourages Mounties to Have a Voice on AI | Mount St. Mary's University Emmitsburg Maryland". news.msmary.edu. Retrieved 2024-07-11.
  51. ↑ College, Wofford. "AI Working Group Events". www.wofford.edu. Retrieved 2024-07-12.
  52. ↑ Futures, Incubator for Transdisciplinary (2023-12-27). "Stories that Win Symposium". Incubator for Transdisciplinary Futures. Retrieved 2024-07-12.
  53. ↑ Humanities, Digital. "Day of DH 2024 - Carleton College". www.carleton.edu. Retrieved 2024-07-11.
  54. ↑ "Symposium: AI Literacy Across the Curriculum · CITLS · Lafayette College". citls.lafayette.edu. Retrieved 2024-08-19.
  55. ↑ "Johnson Center - Austin College". www.austincollege.edu. Retrieved 2024-09-26.
  56. ↑ "Emotional Intelligence and Human Identity at the Dawn of AI Networks". www.smith.edu. Retrieved 2025-02-04.
  57. ↑ "Katherine Elkins Public Talk Page | THE GLOBAL LAB". global-lab.wpi.edu. Retrieved 2025-10-06.
  58. ↑ "Speakers". rallyinnovation.com. Retrieved 2025-10-06.
  59. ↑ "Grab Your Ticket Now. You Won't Want to Miss This". rallyinnovation.com. Retrieved 2025-10-06.
  60. ↑ "Speakers | Weill Cornell Medicine - Qatar". qatar-weill.cornell.edu. Retrieved 2025-10-06.
  61. ↑ "Higher Education Guild in the OpenAI Forum - Event". OpenAI Forum. Retrieved 2025-10-06.
  62. ↑ Szalai, Jennifer (2024-02-07). "How Robots Learned to Write So Well". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 2024-07-13.
  63. ↑ helixcenter (2022-10-16). Coding and the New Human Phenotype: Are Natural Language Generators for Real? . Retrieved 2024-07-12– via YouTube.
  64. ↑ "Sony World Photography Award 2023: Winner refuses award after revealing AI creation". 2023-04-17. Retrieved 2024-08-13.
  65. ↑ "Is AI better at making art than humans?". Al Jazeera. Retrieved 2024-07-11.
  66. ↑ helixcenter (2023-09-24). Emotion . Retrieved 2024-07-12– via YouTube.
  67. ↑ "AI Expert's Adventure with Kate Elkins - Merging Minds". mergingminds.bureauworks.com. Retrieved 2024-07-12.
  68. ↑ "AI Strategy Program | Bloomberg | Emeritus". bloomberg.emeritus.org. Retrieved 2024-07-13.
  69. ↑ "Essential skills and traits of chief AI officers". CIO. Retrieved 2024-07-12.
  70. ↑ "HumanCentric Labs". HumanCentric Labs. Retrieved 2024-07-13.
  71. ↑ "Event Replay: Discoveries Across Disciplines - Video". OpenAI Forum. Retrieved 2025-12-12.
  72. ↑ "Dr Leonardo Impett - CDH". CDH - Cambridge Digital Humanities. 2022-03-07. Retrieved 2025-12-12.
  73. ↑ "OpenAI for Science". openai.com. 2025-11-24. Retrieved 2025-12-12.
  74. ↑ "U.S. Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute". NIST. 2023-10-26.
  75. ↑ "MLA Will Participate in Department of Commerce Consortium Dedicated to AI Safety". news.mla.hcommons.org. Retrieved 2024-07-11.
  76. ↑ "ICML 2024 Position: Near to Mid-term Risks and Opportunities of Open-Source Generative AI Oral". icml.cc. Retrieved 2025-12-13.
  77. ↑ Meta. "Annual Research Workshop". Open Innovation AI Research Community. Retrieved 26 August 2024.
  78. ↑ "Open Innovation AI Research Community". Llama. Archived from the original on 2025-08-05. Retrieved 2025-12-13.
  79. ↑ "Open Innovation AI Research Community". Meta Open Innovation AI Research Community. 26 August 2024. Retrieved 26 August 2024.
  80. ↑ Elkins, Katherine (17 March 2025). "Comparative Global AI Regulation: Policy Perspectives from the EU, China, and the US". Social Science Research Network (SSRN).
  81. ↑ Witt, Christian Schroeder de. "Oxford Witt Lab". Oxford Witt Lab. Retrieved 2025-12-13.
  82. ↑ "Public AI Inference Utility". PublicAI. Retrieved 2025-12-13.
  83. ↑ Walton, Laura Moran. "Notre Dame–IBM Technology Ethics Lab Awards Nearly $1,000,000 to Build Collaborative Research Projects between Teams of Notre Dame Faculty and International Scholars". Tech Ethics Lab. Archived from the original on 2024-07-11. Retrieved 2025-12-13.
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