Dr Imke van Heerden is a Research Associate in the Department of Digital Humanities and a member of Responsible AI UK, where she focuses on the creative sector. Her work identifies points of connection between computational creativity, ethics, aesthetics and literary studies to inform responsible design, application and evaluation of generative AI. She co-leads ARTificial Intelligence (2024–2026), a multidisciplinary, cross-institutional collaboration that examines AI’s impact on visual art.

Prior to joining King’s, Imke taught as a visiting assistant professor at Turkey’s leading research institution, Koc University in Istanbul. As a recipient of the Turkish Research Council’s International Fellowship for Outstanding Researchers, she built and led a small research team. 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 platforms like ChatGPT entered the public domain.

Imke received her 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. She is the winner of the PhD Spotlight Competition at YorkTalks 2016, the University’s annual research showcase.

Research interests

• Responsible AI in the Creative Industries
• Creative AI
• AI Discourse
• Authorship and Literary Theory
• South African Literature

For more details, please see Imke’s research profile.

Expertise and public engagement

Imke has given talks on responsible AI and creativity at London’s Women in Tech Week, the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading in the UK and the South African Centre for Digital Language Resources, among other institutions.

Her previous project, AI as Author, developed a boutique language model called AfriKI to investigate creative text generation. Using this model, she created the poetry collection Silwerwit in die Soontoe (Naledi, 2023), the first work of AI-assisted literature in South Africa. Described as “a watershed moment in the Afrikaans poetry tradition”, the book serves as an early, experimental instance of responsible AI in creative writing. The project received coverage in broadcast, print and digital media, including national newspapers and eNCA – News Channel Africa. Additionally, the team won First Prize in the Turkish Ministry of Tourism and Culture’s competition at TEKNOFEST 2021, the country’s largest tech event.

Imke has partnered with major organisations in Africa, Europe and the UK. As Communications Manager of CRASSH, University of Cambridge, she collaborated with the Humanities and Social Change International Foundation, the Cambridge Festival of Ideas, the Nine Dots Prize and Cambridge University Press. In South Africa, as a literary magazine editor, she worked closely with the cultural and creative industries, including writers and publishers. A personal highlight of the role was inventing and co-developing the national literacy initiative Sing ’it, a multilingual songwriting competition supported by local artists, Sanlam (Africa’s largest insurance group) and MTV Africa. Imke also sang in the Stellenbosch University Choir and was part of their gold-medal win at the 2004 Choir Olympics in Bremen, Germany.

• Please click here to view Imke’s Research Playlist on YouTube.

Selected publications

Van Heerden, Imke. “Ways of Seeing, and Selling, AI Art.” Computer, vol. 59, no. 1, 2026, pp. 150–154. https://doi.org/10.1109/MC.2025.3619760

Van Heerden, Imke. “Post-Apartheid Haptic: Tact and Tactility in Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light.” Journal of Literary Studies, vol. 40, no. 1, 2024, pp. 1–19. https://doi.org/10.25159/1753-5387/16909

Van Heerden, Imke, Cagdas Duman, and Anil Bas. “Performing the Post-Anthropocene: AI: When a Robot Writes a Play.” TDR: The Drama Review – A Journal of Performance Studies, vol. 67, no. 4, 2023, pp. 104–120. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1054204323000448

Van Heerden, Imke, with Anil Bas and Etienne van Heerden. Silwerwit in die Soontoe: Afrikaans se Eerste KI-Gedigte. De Kelders: Naledi, 2023.

Van Heerden, Imke, and Anil Bas. “AI as Author – Bridging the Gap Between Machine Learning and Literary Theory.” Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, vol. 71, 2021, pp. 175–189. https://doi.org/10.1613/jair.1.12593