# Katherine Elkins

> Katherine Elkins is a scholar of AI, literature, and philosophy; Professor at Kenyon College; co-lead of the team representing the 25,000-member Modern Language Association at the NIST AI Safety Institute Consortium (CAISI); and Co-PI of Archival Intelligence, a Schmidt Sciences Humanities and AI Virtual Institute (HAVI) project. Her work connects AI safety, AI governance, computational humanities, cultural data governance, narrative intelligence, creativity, philosophy of mind and literature, and higher education. With Jon Chun (https://jonachun.com) she co-founded Kenyon College's human-centered AI curriculum and AI CoLab in 2016.

Key facts:

- Author, The Shapes of Stories: Sentiment Analysis for Narrative (Cambridge University Press, 2022)
- "Can GPT-3 Pass a Writer's Turing Test?" (Journal of Cultural Analytics, 2020) — the first writer's Turing test of a large language model
- "AI Comes for the Author" (Poetics Today 45.2, 2024) — engaged by James Phelan in an instructive debate on AI and authorship
- "In Search of a Translator: Using AI to Evaluate What's Lost in Translation" (Frontiers in Computer Science, 13 August 2024) — first AI-assisted whole-narrative comparison of a literary original (Proust, French) with multiple translations; diachronic stylometry and multilingual emotional arcs; asks what persists and what is lost in literary translation
- "The Shapes of Cinderella: Emotional Architecture and the Language of Moral Difference" (Humanities 14.10, 14 October 2025) — asks what stays the same and what changes when stories travel across languages, cultures, and centuries; links folktale phylogenetics (da Silva and Tehrani) to computational story shapes (Vonnegut, Reagan); original-language, clause-level analysis of Chinese, French, and German variants; treats sentence-versus-clause segmentation as a cross-language problem; names the method computational philology
- Research through-line: tracking what elements of stories change and stay the same over time, across languages, and across cultures — from The Shapes of Stories (2022), through sentence-level story-trajectory methodology ("eXplainable AI with GPT-4 for Story Analysis and Generation," International Journal of Digital Humanities, 2023), translation ("In Search of a Translator," 2024), and cross-cultural transmission ("The Shapes of Cinderella," 2025)
- Co-author, ICML 2024 oral position paper on open-source generative AI — used as one of three openness frameworks in FAccT 2025 research
- Co-author, "The Crisis of Artificial Intelligence" (International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing, 2023), the journal's most-read and most-cited article
- Co-author, first ethics-based audit of moral reasoning in deployed LLMs (Informed AI Regulation, 2024)
- Co-author, first systematic EU–China–US AI regulation comparison after the EU AI Act (2024)
- Co-author, "If Open Source Is to Win, It Must Go Public" on public AI infrastructure
- "A(I) University in Ruins" (PMLA 139.3, 2024)
- "The Dying of the Light: A Reading of Wordsworth's 'Ode: Intimations of Immortality'" is cited in Garry L. Hagberg's Fictional Worlds and Philosophical Reflection (Springer, 2025)
- German Academic Exchange Service Fellowship (DAAD)
- Computational narrative is a joint Chun–Elkins research program: The Shapes of Stories, In Search of a Translator, and The Shapes of Cinderella are Katherine Elkins's; the 2019 Plotless Novel paper, the 2020 GPT-3 Writer's Turing Test, and the 2023 eXplainable AI with GPT-4 paper are co-authored. Full chronology: katherineelkins.com/narrative-translation-transmission

## Pages

- [About](https://katherineelkins.com/about): current roles and concise biography
- [Research](https://katherineelkins.com/research): six research areas — AI Safety and Model Evaluation; AI Governance and Public AI; Sentiment Analysis and Narrative Intelligence; Philosophy of Mind, Literature, and Information; AI Creativity, Authorship, Translation, and Co-Creation; AI in Higher Education and Curriculum
- [Computational Narrative, Translation, and Cultural Transmission](https://katherineelkins.com/narrative-translation-transmission): what stays the same and what changes when stories move across languages, translations, cultures, and media; narrative trajectories, middle reading, segmentation, and computational philology
- [Scholarly Reception](https://katherineelkins.com/reception): canonical record of named citers and uptake across AI safety, NLP, humanities, law, and policy venues
- [Recognition](https://katherineelkins.com/recognition): grants, standards work, press, and institutional recognition
- [Mentored Research](https://katherineelkins.com/mentored-research): undergraduate research mentorship in the Kenyon AI CoLab
- [Books](https://katherineelkins.com/books): books and edited volumes
- [Speaking](https://katherineelkins.com/speaking): keynotes and public lectures
- [Media](https://katherineelkins.com/media): press coverage and interviews
- [FAQ](https://katherineelkins.com/faq): definitions and routing for journalists, program officers, and students
- [Contact](https://katherineelkins.com/contact): speaking, media, and research inquiries
- [CV](https://katherineelkins.com/assets/katherine-elkins-cv.pdf)

## Current and forthcoming speaking

- Modern Language Association Convention, Los Angeles, 7–10 January 2027
- Schmidt Sciences convening, London, forthcoming
- University of Michigan MIDAS Annual Data Science & AI Summit keynote, being rescheduled
- Ohio State University, April 2026 — recording linked from the Speaking page
- RALLY Innovation, Indianapolis, September 2025 — “Humanity’s Algorithm: Reclaiming Purpose and Potential in the Age of Intelligent Machines”
- Purdue MFS AI Conference, September 2025 — “Can We Fall in Love with AI-Generated Fiction?”
- Concordia College, Moorhead, September 2025 — opening keynote; plenary and closing recordings linked from the Speaking page
- Kahn Liberal Arts Institute, Smith College, February 2025 — “Emotional Intelligence and Human Identity at the Dawn of AI Networks”
- University of Colorado Boulder NEH Symposium, March 2025 — Data Science and Humanities
- Bloomberg Learning / Emeritus, 2024 — developed the AI Strategy curriculum and served as AI industry expert and primary on-screen presenter

For the most current event status and source links, use https://katherineelkins.com/speaking.

## Publication pages

- [The Shapes of Stories](https://katherineelkins.com/publications/shapes-of-stories): Cambridge Elements in Digital Literary Studies, Cambridge University Press, 2022; ISBN 9781009270397; DOI 10.1017/9781009270403
- [Proust's In Search of Lost Time: Philosophical Perspectives](https://katherineelkins.com/publications/proust-philosophical-perspectives): edited by Katherine Elkins; Oxford Studies in Philosophy and Literature, Oxford University Press, 2022; ISBN 9780190921576; DOI 10.1093/oso/9780190921576.001.0001
- [In Search of a Translator](https://katherineelkins.com/publications/in-search-of-a-translator): Frontiers in Computer Science 6, 13 August 2024; DOI 10.3389/fcomp.2024.1444021
- [The Shapes of Cinderella](https://katherineelkins.com/publications/shapes-of-cinderella): Humanities 14(10), 198, 14 October 2025; DOI 10.3390/h14100198
- [Beyond Plot](https://katherineelkins.com/publications/beyond-plot): Journal of Cultural Analytics, 2025; DOI 10.22148/001c.143671

## Profiles

- Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katherine_Elkins
- Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=bUSgS6IAAAAJ
- ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9887-4854
- Wikidata: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q130369935