# Katherine Elkins

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

## Early life

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

## Teaching

Elkins is a professor of comparative literature and humanities in the Integrated Program for Humane Studies (IPHS) and faculty in Computing at Kenyon College. She is a founding co-director of the KDH lab and co-created the first human-centered artificial intelligence curriculum launched in 2016 at Kenyon College as the director of IPHS. She has mentored and co-authored hundreds of student ML/AI research projects in the humanities, arts and social sciences that have been downloaded almost 60,000 times worldwide as of September 2024. Her recorded lectures with The Modern Scholar on The Modern Novel (2021) and The Giants of French Literature (2020) are tailored to broader public audiences via Amazon's Audible.com. 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.

## 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, provided a comprehensive methodology for using diachronic sentiment analysis to analyze the emotional aspects of plot across dozens of literary classics using SentimentArcs. This method has been used to analyze narrative in diverse forms including literature, translations, TV scripts, end of life medical narratives, and the evolution of social media narratives for elections and economic crisis.
She presented the first transdisciplinary AI research at leading academic conferences including the Modernist Studies Association in October 2019, The International Society for the Study of Narrative in March 2020 and the Modern Language Association Conference in January 2021. Elkins was an early advocate for incorporating AI in literary studies with co-authored essays in The Journal of Cultural Analytics in September 2020 and Narrative in January 2021. More recently she focused on how AI redefines writing, creativity, authorship, translations of literature, eXplainable AI, and the future of the academia in leading journals like Poetics Today. 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. Her collaborative position paper addressing the risks and benefits of open-source AI was selected for oral presentation at ICML in July 2024.
Elkins traditional scholarship includes essays on Plato, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, and William Wordsworth. In 2001 she won the A. Owen Aldridge Prize in Comparative Literature for an essay on Charles Baudelaire. 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.

## 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. She gave the Meredith-Donovan lecture at Mount Saint Mary's University in 2023, featured AI Working Group lecture at Wofford College, and presentation at the Stories that Win Symposium at Washington University in 2024. 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, Lafayette College AI Literacy Across the Curriculum, and Austin College's A.J. Carlson Lecture. She will present on "How agentic behavior, reasoning, and emotional intelligence upend previous notions of human exceptionalism" for the Khan Institute at Smith College in February 2025.
Elkins has been a co-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 in October 2022. Elkins debated AI generative art with co-panelist Boris Eldagsen (winner of Sony World Photography Award 2023) and Shane Balkowitsch on Al Jazeera in April 2023. She presented her perspectives on emotions at the intersection of AI and literature with experts Rosalind Picard, Joseph LeDoux, and Mabel Berezin. She discussed what gets lost in machine translation on the podcast Merging Minds.
She is the AI industry expert for Bloomberg's new AI Strategy Course launched 2024. She serves as CAIO of HumanCentricLabs emphasizing humane applications of AI in the workplace.

## Collaborations

Kenyon College awarded Elkins the senior trustee teaching award In 2014. In March 2024 she was named a principal investigator for NIST's US AI Safety Institute representing the Modern Language Association. She was awarded a Notre Dame-IBM Tech Ethics Lab award in April 2024 to research the ethics and performance of SOTA LLM models to predict criminal recidivism. Elkins has been a member of Meta's Open Innovation AI Research Community since 2023 and will present at the 2024 Conference at Meta's London Office in October. In January 2025, Elkins presented her grant research finding on LLM predictive policing at Notre Dame.