AI Safety · Research · Author

Katherine Elkins

Katherine Elkins is a scholar of AI, literature, and philosophy. She represents the Modern Language Association at the U.S. AI Safety Institute Consortium (CAISI) and is Co-PI of the Schmidt Sciences HAVI project Archival Intelligence.

  • Co-Founder & Co-Director, Human-Centered AI Lab
  • Co-leading the MLA team at the NIST AI Safety Institute Consortium
  • Co-PI, Schmidt Sciences HAVI (“Archival Intelligence”)
  • Working on a series of essays on AI and what the dominant frameworks miss

Visit Wikipedia for a current summary of research collaborations across academia, industry, and government.

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Katherine Elkins, AI safety researcher and author

Early on AI

Recent Activity

News & Media

Feb 2026

Christian Science Monitor — quoted on language-model evaluation at the NIST AI Safety Institute Consortium

Feb 2026

NPR / WOSU — “Could AI Save Endangered Archives?”

Jun 2025

Chronicle of Higher Education Virtual Forum — invited speaker

Dec 2025

Engineering (Chinese Academy of Sciences / Elsevier) — translation research featured

Nov 2025

Forbes — “Where AI Meets the Humanities”

Oct 2025

OpenAI Higher Education Forum — Education Guild selected speaker

Oct 2025

Weill Cornell Medicine-Qatar — METC Conference keynote

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Katherine Elkins?

Katherine Elkins is a scholar of AI, literature, and philosophy and a Professor at Kenyon College, where she directs the Integrated Program in Humane Studies. She co-founded the Human-Centered AI Lab and co-developed the world's first human-centered AI curriculum in 2016, co-leads the team representing the Modern Language Association at the NIST AI Safety Institute Consortium (CAISI), and is Co-Principal Investigator of the Schmidt Sciences HAVI project Archival Intelligence.

What is Katherine Elkins known for?

She is known for early, influential work at the intersection of AI and the humanities — including “Can GPT-3 Pass a Writer's Turing Test?” (2020) and the book The Shapes of Stories (Cambridge University Press, 2022) — and for AI safety research on auditing frontier language models, AI governance, and what large language models mean for creativity and higher education.

What is the Archival Intelligence project?

Archival Intelligence is a Schmidt Sciences Humanities and AI Virtual Institute (HAVI) project — one of 23 teams selected worldwide — for which Elkins is Co-Principal Investigator. It develops AI-powered tools to rescue and restore endangered cultural archives, beginning with collections in New Orleans.

What books has Katherine Elkins written?

She is the author of The Shapes of Stories: Sentiment Analysis for Narrative (Cambridge University Press, 2022) and the editor of Proust's In Search of Lost Time: Philosophical Perspectives (Oxford University Press, 2022).

Where can I find her research and publications?

Her work is organized by topic on the Research page — AI Safety, Governance, Storytelling, Mind, Creativity, and AI in Higher Education. A complete publication list is available on her Google Scholar and ORCID profiles.