Faculty

Jon Chun has degrees in electrical engineering, computer science and biomedical engineering with a focus on cognitive science from UC Berkeley and UT Austin. As a post-graduate American Heart Research Fellow, he conducted and published research in both gene therapy and medical informatics.  He has also worked for the Advanced Light Source Group at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and the semiconductor research consortium SEMATECH in Austin.  His research interests include Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Data Analytics, Natural Language Processing and Affective AI.

Professor Chun has co-founded several startups including as CEO and COO of the world’s largest anonymity service backed by large Wall Street hedge funds and the CIA’s venture fund In-Q-Tel. His specialization in cross-cultural experiences of technology stems from working and studying throughout the US, Europe, Asia and Latin America including the US Foreign Service Spanish Exam and the 日本語能力試験 (Japanese). Before arriving in Gambier he was a Director of Development for the world’s largest computer security corporations in Silicon Valley and Entrepreneur in Residence at UC Berkeley.

Jon is interested in bringing diverse voices to urgent debates surrounding technology’s growing impact on society. Since 2017 his courses, Programming Humanity and AI for the Humanities, have been the first curriculum specifically designed to bridge the gap between technology and the Humanities by provided an integrated intellectual framework grounded in the liberal arts and Artificial Intelligence.

Katherine Elkins is founder of Kenyon’s Comparative World Literature Program and the NEH Distinguished Teaching Professor of Humanities. She has won awards for both research and teaching, most recently Kenyon’s Senior Faculty Trustee Teaching Award. Currently, she is developing a Digital Humanities program unique to Kenyon.

Her many lectures on French literature and the modern novel are available on audible.com, and her research has been published in journals like Comparative Literature Studies, Modern Language Quarterly, Modernism/Modernity, Discourse and The French Review. She has also presented research at conferences both nationally and internationally, and is editor and contributor of the Oxford Studies in Literature and Philosophy: Proust (forthcoming). She and Jon Chun are presently developing new computational approaches to literary analysis.