Katherine Elkins

Last updated

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

Contents

Education

Elkins earned a BA from Yale University and a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. [1]

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 a human-centered artificial intelligence [4] curriculum launched in 2016 at Kenyon College [5] as the director of IPHS. She recorded two lecture series for The Modern Scholar, Giants of French Literature (2010) and The Modern Novel (2013). [6] [7]

Research

Elkins’s research addresses artificial intelligence in relation to literature, narrative, affective computing, and the ethics of AI. Her book TheShapes of Stories, published by Cambridge University Press in 2022, [8] provides a methodology for using diachronic sentiment analysis to analyze the emotional aspects of plot across dozens of literary classics using SentimentArcs. [9]

Elkins has co-authored essays on AI in literary studies in The Journal of Cultural Analytics in September 2020 [10] and Narrative in 2022. [11] 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. [12]

Elkins's traditional scholarship includes essays on Plato, [13] Virginia Woolf, [14] Franz Kafka, [15] Marcel Proust, [16] and William Wordsworth. [17] In 2001 she won the A. Owen Aldridge Prize [18] in Comparative Literature for an essay on Charles Baudelaire. [18] She edited Proust's In Search of Lost Time: Philosophical Perspectives (Oxford University Press, 2022). [19]

In December 2025, Schmidt Sciences' Humanities and AI Virtual Institute funded a project led by Elkins, "Archival Intelligence: Rescuing New Orleans' Endangered Cultural Legacy", to use AI to preserve endangered archives. [20] [21]

AI safety and regulation

Elkins co-led the Modern Language Association's team in the U.S. AI Safety Institute Consortium, established by the National Institute of Standards and Technology in 2024. [22]

Elkins co-authors research on AI governance and regulation. A position paper on the risks and opportunities of open-source generative AI, written with an international group of researchers, was selected for an oral presentation at the 2024 International Conference on Machine Learning. [23]

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. [24]

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. ↑ Elkins, Katherine (2013). "The Modern Scholar: The Modern Novel". Audible.com The Modern Scholar Lectures. Retrieved 13 July 2024.
  7. ↑ 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.
  8. ↑ 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.
  9. ↑ 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 [cs.CL].
  10. ↑ 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 (inactive 29 January 2026).{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of January 2026 (link)
  11. ↑ 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.
  12. ↑ 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.
  13. ↑ 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.
  14. ↑ 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.
  15. ↑ "Project MUSE - MLN-Volume 136, Number 3, April 2021 (German Issue)". muse.jhu.edu. Retrieved 2024-07-11.
  16. ↑ 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.
  17. ↑ Elkins, Katherine (2022), "Wordsworth's Literary Sublime" , in Hagberg, Garry (ed.), 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
  18. 1 2 "A. Owen Aldridge Prize". www.acla.org. American Comparative Literature Association. Retrieved 2024-07-13.
  19. ↑ 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.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: periodical has ISBN (link)
  20. ↑ Medina, Gabe (2025-12-11). "Schmidt Sciences awards $11M in grants to bring AI to humanities research". Schmidt Sciences. Retrieved 2025-12-12.
  21. ↑ Crawford, Kendall (2026-02-10). "Kenyon College cohort aims to use artificial intelligence to save archives". WOUB Public Media. Retrieved 2026-09-11.
  22. ↑ "MLA Will Participate in Department of Commerce Consortium Dedicated to AI Safety". news.mla.hcommons.org. Retrieved 2024-07-11.
  23. ↑ "ICML 2024 Position: Near to Mid-term Risks and Opportunities of Open-Source Generative AI Oral". icml.cc. Retrieved 2025-12-13.
  24. ↑ 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.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.