Draft: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 over 55,000 times worldwide. 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.

Writing
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 creativity, authorship and the future of the academic field. 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 publically 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, an AI Working Group lecture at Wofford College, a presentation at the Stories that Win Symposium at Washington University in 2024, and the keynote for Carleton College's Day of Digital Humanities in 2024.

Elkins has been a co-panelist on interdisciplinary AI conversations with thought leaders from diverse fields. She discussed language, epistomology 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 and Shane Balkowitsch on Al Jazeera in April of 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.

Elkins also serves as a bridge between academia and industry. 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.

Recognition
Kenyon College awarded Elkins the senior trustee teaching award In 2014. In March of 2024 she was named a Principle 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.