Tessa Haining

Biography

Tessa Haining is a PhD student at Stanford University under the Modern Thought and Literature program, based in the Departments of English and Political Science. Tessa engages both traditional and computational methods to explore literature's contemporary public role. She is particularly interested in what humanistic knowledge can bring to bear on artificial intelligence, and has collaborated with literary scholars, computer scientists, and cognitive scientists on projects that probe the intersection of literary studies and LLMs. Prior to Stanford, Tessa received an MPhil with Distinction in Modern Languages from the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and an AB summa cum laude from Harvard College in Chemistry and Comparative Literature. When she's not at her desk or with a book, she can be found running, hiking, or playing otherwise outside in homage to her past as a varsity rower.