Katherine Elkins is a Professor of Humanities and Comparative Literature at Kenyon College, where she directs the Integrated Program in Humane Studies (IPHS) — Kenyon's oldest interdisciplinary curriculum. She holds a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley and a B.A. from Yale. In 2016, she and Jon Chun co-founded the world's first interdisciplinary Human-Centered AI curriculum and CoLab at Kenyon College, now approaching its 10th anniversary. Her research spans AI ethics, explainability in large language models, computational narrative analysis, and affective computing. She is the author of The Shapes of Stories: Sentiment Analysis for Narrative (Cambridge University Press, 2022) and has published in PMLA, Poetics Today, Narrative, ICML, Frontiers of Computer Science, and the Journal of Cultural Analytics. Since March 2024, she has served as Principal Investigator for the MLA's participation in the NIST US AI Safety Institute Consortium. In 2025, she was awarded a Schmidt Sciences HAVI grant ($330K) as PI, making Kenyon 1 of 23 worldwide teams developing AI tools for rescuing endangered archives. She also holds a Notre Dame-IBM Tech Ethics Lab grant researching LLM bias in criminal recidivism prediction. Her research has been downloaded 90,000+ times from 4,000+ institutions worldwide, with 700+ citations. She serves on the executive board of The Helix Center.
Roundtable Appearances
