Krebs Humanities Scholars

Ars Machina Vitae: A Reproductive Odyssey is an interactive pixel-art game that weaves together authentic medical diagnoses, narrative storytelling, and AI technology to offer a "choose your own adventure" experience exploring infertility journeys. Krebs Humanities Scholars Eliana Wolf (double majoring in CS and NMAD) and Adnan Demirovic (majoring in CS) will assist in bringing these narratives to life. Wolf will design the pixel-art assets, including character sprites and environmental elements, while Demirovic will program the game mechanics in Unity. Participants will navigate the lives of distinct characters confronting challenges related to reproductive technologies, societal expectations, and personal dilemmas. Through AI-assisted tools and student contributions, the project represents a synthesis of human creativity and artificial intelligence, challenging players to reflect on technology's role in shaping intimate human experiences and the future of reproduction.

This independent study conducts a literature review on how Traditional Chinese Medicine is evolving in the age of artificial intelligence. For centuries, TCM employs acupuncture, herbal remedies, massage, and dietary therapy to support holistic healing. With recent technological advancements, AI is increasingly applied to areas such as herbal compound screening, diagnostic support, and treatment planning. AI tools also help identify patterns in patient data, enabling more personalized and precise care. This project surveys current research on the integration of AI into traditional medical practices and examines the ethical questions that arise, including data privacy, cultural preservation, and the risk of overreliance on algorithms.

The Leave the Light On Audio Project is a short form podcast that grew out of a student-written play produced by the Theater Department in 2023. The podcast integrates voices from interviews with caretakers, care activists, and actors who bring these subjects to life. Leave the Light On explores the way we value, understand, and celebrate the very concept of care, and explores how care is the work that makes everything possible.

This project aims to engage various local publics in accessing and documenting the history of racially restrictive covenants in Lake County. Racially restrictive covenants were widely used in the mid-twentieth century to legally enforce segregation, typically barring African Americans, and sometimes also Jews and other groups, from purchasing property. These powerful but fragmentary historical records are housed in the Lake County Clerk's office in Waukegan. Rudi Batzell and his research assistant, Sitara Ihlenfeld Paulson, will be working to engage Lake Forest College students, local museums and history centers, and housing justice advocacy groups in collaboratively identifying, recording, and making accessible through public history projects these important markers of racial inequality and exclusion in US history. This research will contribute to the ongoing work of the Chicago Covenants project, expanding the scope from Cook County to Lake County.

https://www.chicagocovenants.com/

As part of the College’s HUMAN grant activities, Kimiko Matsumura is organizing a campus-wide art exhibition using computer vision for research and curation purposes. This semester, senior New Media Art and Design major and Communication minor Millie Velez is designing a website to accompany the upcoming exhibition. The website will include project information, curatorial research, and object findings to engage in public history and contribute to the digital humanities. Millie is interested in learning how AI tools are changing web design processes and seeks to apply these tools in a critical fashion, mirroring the experimental intentions of Matsumura’s HUMAN fellows project and extending these questions into the creation of the project website itself.

The Krebs Humanities Scholar Program has generously supported Michael Nsibande ’27, and me in an independent study course on the aesthetics of painting. We chose a set of about a dozen paintings from the Krebs collection, and have been considering how various philosophers would understand each one. As a part of our investigation, we’ve spent several hours in extended viewing and conversation about particular works in the collection: what is aesthetic distance, and how does it interrelate with the emotional effect of a work? How, and to what extent can a painting fool the eye? What are paintings trying to do?

The Krebs Humanities Scholar program is providing support for Alex Hanin to serve as research assistant, junior editor, and publicity intern for my forthcoming novel, The Last Words of Jack Ruby, to be published by Tortoise Books on November 24, 2026. This is a historical novel inspired by the lifelong friendship of my cousin Barney Ross (boxer, war hero, drug addict, gun runner) with the notorious assassin; Ruby and Ross grew up together on the mean streets of the Maxwell Street ghetto in Prohibition Chicago. The novel follows a sharp young FBI agent on his quest to discover the true motivations for Ruby’s shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald as Ruby lies dying in a Dallas hospital. Alex is providing invaluable assistance in developing a plan for promoting the novel in the Chicago area, the Midwest, and nationally.

The critical theorist Sianne Ngai has rightly pointed out that aesthetic theory has concentrated on elevated categories such as the beautiful and the sublime, while ignoring what she calls our “vernacular aesthetic ideas” such as the cute, the zany, and the interesting. Our aim in this project is to define the nature of what is known as “cringe” aesthetics—generally a category associated with childishness, guilty pleasures, and kitsch. Our aim will be not only to delineate how the term has come to be used in aesthetic discussions (both academic and popular), but to trace the function of the term and its associated ideas—cringecore, cringe comedy, and the like. Through an examination of terminological usage and particular examples the student fellow and I will co-author an article on the aesthetics of cringe.

This creative project explored how AI-assisted video can enhance the emotional and visual impact of multilingual poetry. Using original poems from Collage Magazine, students  experimented with various AI video generation tools and editing platforms to create short, visually compelling video poems. Tools include Runway ML, Pika Labs, Kaiber, Sora, and Canva Pro. The student compared the strengths and limitations of each platform to determine the most effective approaches for translating poetic language into motion. The project emphasizes how sound and animation can deepen the thematic resonance of poetry. Final work was presented at the 2026 Collage Panel during the Lake Forest College Student Symposium, offering a powerful demonstration of the intersection between creative writing, technology, and visual storytelling.

This independent study conducts a literature review on how Traditional Chinese Medicine is evolving in the age of artificial intelligence. For centuries, TCM employs acupuncture, herbal remedies, massage, and dietary therapy to support holistic healing. With recent technological advancements, AI is increasingly applied to areas such as herbal compound screening, diagnostic support, and treatment planning. AI tools also help identify patterns in patient data, enabling more personalized and precise care. This project surveys current research on the integration of AI into traditional medical practices and examines the ethical questions that arise, including data privacy, cultural preservation, and the risk of overreliance on algorithms.

The student spent a semester independently studying several types of biases in artificial intelligence (AI). AI systems are trained on a large corpus of internet sourced data, which contains human writings that may contain various types of bias, such as political or interpersonal bias along the axis of identity. In this case, the student examined existing bias in the contemporaneous versions of OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude large language models (LLMs). Three areas of model bias were tested and examined: gender, racial and political orientation bias. The student researched the current literature on the topic of AI bias and wrote a report on their findings after querying bot frontier lab models on the subjects. 

The Krebs Humanities Scholar Program has generously supported me and my research assistant, Derick Perdana, as we undertake historical research for my next novel, Let Me Talk to Harpo Marx, scheduled for publication by Regal House in 2027. The novel, the third in a historical trilogy set in the 1920s, takes us to old Hollywood. The plot involves the early film industry, so Derick and I have been looking into the economic and labor structure of the studio system, the rivalries between film distribution companies, and the technological and economic issues related to the development of film sound. We have also been delving into biographical details about certain Hollywood personalities of the era—but to say too much more would be to spoil the plot!

Lago/Volcano is Bielak’s collaborative multimedia art project that uses Lake Michigan and the volcanoes Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl to explore the ways we anticipate and respond to environmental instability by attuning to natural bodies. Through video, drawings, and poems, Lago/Volcano will highlight the ways urbanity can habituate us to the extraordinary geologic bodies in our midst, how we can remain attentive to their presence, and how tuning into them can help us anticipate and respond to environmental instability. The project will include drawings at the scale of the landscape, prints, and visual poems based on research in the fields of geology, climatology, and botany. Senior SOAN major and Studio Art minor Angelica Hryb is working closely with Bielak on this cross-disciplinary research, the findings of which have ranged from imagery of molecular structures of plant life in Lake Michigan, to data on Popocatépetl’s ash distribution. Bielak recently applied this research in a production trip to Mexico City, the Paso de Cortés (the mountain pass between the volcanos Popocatépetl and  Iztaccihuatl) and Zacualpan de Amilpas, Morelos, on the other side of  Popocatépetl.

Archaeological practice has long harnessed digital tools to disseminate research findings to a broad public. This project looks at several ways AI-aided technologies can been used in this service, with attention to interactive engagements at historic sites and house museums. Using the results from archaeological and cultural landscapes studies at the Edith Farnsworth House, a Ludwig Mies van der Rohe-designed National Historic Landmark in Plano, Illinois, we consider how AI-aided technologies such as chatbots can be used to interpret the multiple episodes of land use and social meaning.

Computer vision has now progressed to the point of reliable visual analysis for artistic objects, offering insight into form and context with reasonable accuracy under expert guidance. This project uses AI to analyze images in the Krebs collection, compare the output with our own analyses derived from connoisseurship practices, and evaluate any promising research leads. Our goals are twofold: first, we aim to better understand the collection to enhance our records as we catalog the artworks; second, we seek to illustrate the current strengths and weaknesses of computer vision for art history. By studying lesser-known objects through both expert and computer lenses, we explore the efficacy of publicly available AI programs for real-life museological work as we contemplate the role of AI in humanities research for the present and future.

What would it have been like to attend a pageant on the streets of Renaissance London: to hear speeches written by some of the best playwrights through the commotion of the crowd, to see floats designed by leading architects amidst fireworks, cannon shots, and water-shows? This project aims to provide such an immersive experience, beginning work on digitally modeling Thomas Middleton's pageant "The Triumphs of Health and Prosperity" on October 29, 1626. The ultimate goal will be for users to experience the pageant across 5 different locations across the city although, to make things more manageable, we will limit ourselves to the first location (at St. Michael's de la Querne and the "Little Conduit"). Students would help me begin this project by doing a deep dive into the material conditions and historical locations of this first pageant (that is, the "Fragrant Garden" of Health), and will begin developing the key scenes (including, but not limited to: the historical location; the pageant cart designs; the performance of the speeches; clothing and costumes). Taking the "Virtual Saint Paul's Cross" as our guide and using AI to streamline our research process, this group will get our bearings with digital modeling technology as we seek to recreate the historic experience of attending Middleton's civic spectacle. Ultimately, this project will provide invaluable data for scholars of the early theater, who have long emphasized the multisensory and diverse experiences of the early modern playhouse that are often left out of the exclusive analyses of texts; moreover, it would be a resource for emerging scholarship on the mayoral shows (and might thus be included in anthologies and future publications).

This project explores how AI-generated digital art can enrich the thematic essence of multilingual poetry in Collage Magazine. As a publication that celebrates the cultural and linguistic diversity of the Lake Forest College community, Collage provides a creative platform for students to express themselves in languages other than English. Through extensive testing of over a dozen AI art generators, the project identified the most effective tools for visually interpreting poetry, refining prompts to capture the poem’s emotional depth. The selected AI-generated images serve as the thematic artwork for the 2025 edition of Collage Magazine, reflecting the core themes of Identity, Love, and Memory. These illustrations add a dynamic visual and interpretive layer to this year’s publication, enhancing the reader’s engagement with the poetic expressions within.