King's College London
Dr Imke van Heerden is a Research Associate at RAi UK, based in the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London. Her research lies at the intersection of literary studies, computational creativity, and natural language generation.
Under the RAi Cornerstone programme, Imke co-leads ARTificial Intelligence (ART-I) (2024-2026), a multidisciplinary, cross-institutional collaboration that examines AI’s impact on creative communities. She is also a member of the Public Engagement, Outreach and Policy Pillar.
Previously, Imke was a visiting assistant professor at Koc University in Istanbul, having received the Turkish Research Council’s International Fellowship for Outstanding Researchers. She was the Principal Investigator of AI as Author: Bridging the Gap between Computational Creativity Techniques and Literary Theory (2020-2023), an interdisciplinary project that anticipated language models’ transformative impact before tools like ChatGPT entered the public domain.
Imke’s research emphasises the benefit of the arts and humanities to the responsible design and evaluation of generative AI systems. She specialises in postcolonial literature as well, holding a PhD in English Literature from the University of York, funded by the Commonwealth Scholarship Commission in the UK and a Doctoral Fellowship from York’s Humanities Research Centre.