Curriculum Vitae
Research Grants and Fellowships
Annenberg Faculty Fellowship, Stanford University, 2015-2017
Faculty College Award for Curriculum Development (Digital Humanities Minor), Stanford University, 2014-1015
National Endowment for the Humanities Digging into Data Challenge Grant. “Global Currents: Cultures of Literary Networks, 1050-1900.” Co-PI of Stanford Team, 2014-2016 [$124,559]
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Partnership Grant. “Novel TM: Text Mining the Novel.” Co-applicant, 2014-2019 [$120,000]
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Insight Development Grant. “The Werther Effect: Topologies of Eighteenth-Century Literature.” Collaborator with Andrew Piper, 2011-2013 [$55,584]
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Research Development Initiative Grant, “The BiblioGraph: Making New Connections in Book History Using Digital Technologies.” Co-applicant with Tom Mole and Alan Liu, 2010-2012. [$40,000].
Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, McGill University, 2010-2012
Halsband Fellowship for Dissertation Research in the Eighteenth Century, English Department, New York University, 2004-2005; 2006-2007
Henry M. MacCraken Fellowship, New York University, 2001-2006
Publications
“Mapping Emotion in Fictional London,” Literary Mapping in the Digital Age. Ed. Christopher Donaldson. Forthcoming from Ashgate, 2015
“Criticism and the Sublime” Encyclopaedia of British Literature 1660-1789 Ed. Gary Day and Jack Lynch. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, March, 2015.
“Between Canon and Corpus: Six Perspectives on 20th-Century Novels” (with Mark McGurl). The Stanford Literary Lab Pamphlet Series Ed. Franco Moretti. January, 2015
“The Werther Effect I: Goethe Topologically,” (with Andrew Piper). In: Distant Reading/Descriptive Turns: Topologies of German Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century. Ed. Matt Erlin and Lynn Tatlock. Rochester: Camden House, 2014. 155-184.
“Aesthetics as Action: Publishing as Recursive Agency in the Long Eighteenth Century” Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net 58(2010): 1-21.
“[Re]zoning the Naïve: Schiller’s Construction of Autohistoriography.” European Romantic Review 14:2 (2003): 197-203.
“The Unspoken Word: Race and the New Language of Identity” (with Bridget Algee-Hewitt). Under review for Current Anthropology.
Select Collaborative Digital Humanities Projects
Principal Investigator or Primary Collaborator:
“Suspense: Language, Narrative, Affect” with Chelsea Davis, Abigail Droge, Tasha Eccles, Morgan Frank, Erik Fredner, J. D. Porter, Andrew Shepherd and Hannah Walser (the Stanford Literary Lab)
This project combines Digital Humanities and Social Psychology methods to bridge the gap between the experience of suspense as it is felt by the reader and the formal features that may be responsible for producing this feeling. Project leader and principal investigator.
“The Cryptic Novel: A Taxonomy of Titles in the 18th Century Literary Marketplace.” with Anita Low, Laura Eidem and Tanya Llewellyn (the Stanford Literary Lab)
This project seeks to uncover the potential textual effects of self-ascribed genre labels within the early eighteenth-century literary marketplace. Project leader and principal investigator.
“The Transhistorical Poetry Project” with Ryan Heuser, J.D. Porter, Johnathan Sensenbaugh, and Justin Tackett (the Stanford Literary Lab).
This project traces the history of poetic form over a large corpus of English poetry from the late Middle Ages to the twentieth century using a new algorithmic approach to detecting verse scheme, meter and rhyme. Co-principal investigator.
“The Language of the Environment in the Courts” with Michael Burger (Executive Director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at the Columbia Law School) and Franco Moretti.
This project investigates patterns in the language of decisions rendered by the Supreme Court of the United States on topics pertaining to Environmental Legislation since 1960. Co-Principal investigator.
“The Werther Effect: Topologies of Eighteenth-Century Literature,” with Andrew Piper (McGill University).
This project seeks to understand the impact that Goethe’s epistolary novel had on eighteenth-century writing. Created quantitative model of lexical clustering and topological visualization of Werther’s influence. Co-Principal investigator.
“The Book History BiblioGraph.” with Tom Mole (University of Edinburgh)
The Book History BiblioGraph is an online resource that uses new quantitative and visualization techniques to create an interactive visual representation of the current field of book history. Co-director of project.
Research Collaborator
“Canon, Archive, Literary History” with Franco Moretti and Ryan Heuser
Designed new computational methods using information theory to trace the relationship between canonical and non-canonical texts in a nineteenth-century corpus.
“Digital Mitford”; Project Leader: Elisa Besharo-Bondar (University of Pittsburgh, Greensburg)
Consulted on best practices for encoding and web-based display of the works of Mary Russell Mitford. Will contribute to visualization platform for text statistics within the archive.
SYSTEM: The Shape of Knowledge From the Enlightenment, by Clifford Siskin
Designed quantitative method to compare discourse of systems and essays in eighteenth-century titles. Contributed visualizations and explanatory notes for text.
Recent Presentations
Invited Lectures
“The Performance of Character: Digital Models for Gendered Speech in Romantic period Literature” invited guest lecture at Simon Fraser University, 2015.
“Data and the Critical Process: Knowledge Creation in the Digital Humanities” invited guest lecture and workshop at NYU Libraries Digital Humanities Program, 2015.
“Suspense: Technology, Narrative, Affect” invited presentation to the English Department, Harvard University, 2015.
“The Disorder of Discourse: Digital Models for an Aesthetic Literary Theory” invited guest lecture in the Strode Seminar series, University of Alabama, 2015.
“From Poetic Meter to The Affect of Suspense: Two Approaches to Quantitative Formalism” invited guest lecture to the University of California, Santa Barbara Transcriptions Center, 2014.
“Romancing the Novel: Quantitatively Recovering Eighteenth-Century Genres,” invited keynote lecture for Brigham Young University conference on Digital Humanities, 2013
“Computational Aesthetics: Mapping the Language of the Sublime in the long Nineteenth Century” presented as an invited guest lecture at the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities at Vanderbilt University, December 2011.
Conference Presentations
“Discourse, Design and Disorder: Digital Models for an Aesthetic Literary Theory”, presented at the 2015 ADHO Digital Humanities conference, Sydney, Australia.
“Suspense: Language, Narrative, Affect.” (with J.D. Porter and Hannah Walser) presented at the 2015 ADHO Digital Humanities conference, Sydney, Australia.
“The Unspoken Word: Race and the New Language of Identity” (with Bridget Algee-Hewitt), presented at the 2015 ADHO Digital Humanities conference, Sydney, Australia.
“Mapping the Emotions of London in Fiction, 1700-1900: A Crowdsourcing Experiment” (with Ryan Heuser), presented at the 2015 ADHO Digital Humanities conference, Sydney, Australia.
“Knowledge Networks, Juxtaposed: Disciplinarily in the Encyclopédie and Wikipedia” (with Ryan Heuser and John Bender) presented at the 2015 ADHO Digital Humanities conference, Sydney, Australia.
“Measuring Virality: Quantifying Formal and Paratextual Features Associated with ‘Viral’ Books” (with Erik Fredner), presented at the 2015 ADHO Digital Humanities conference, Sydney, Australia.
“Fear, Narrative and Place: Two Approaches to Affect in the Digital Humanities” presented at the conference “Cultural Analytics”, University of Chicago, 2015.
“The Order of Poetry: Information, Aesthetics and Jakobson’s Theory of Literary Communication” presented at the conference “Russian Formalism and the Digital Humanities,” Stanford, 2015.
“Voicing the Other: Computational Models of Gender Performance in the Late Eighteenth Century” presented at the 2015 ASECS conference.
“The Computational Sensibility Project” (with Michelle Levy) presented at the 2015 ASECS conference.
“The Cryptic Novel: A Computational Taxonomy of the Eighteenth-Century Literary Field” presented at the 2014 Digital Humanities conference.
“The Stanford Literary Lab Transhistorical Poetry Project Phase II: Metrical Form” presented at the 2014 Digital Humanities conference.
“’Strange and Suprizing Adventures’: A Digital Disarticulation of the 18th-century Literary Field – Introduction: The Cryptic Novel” presented as opening remarks to the special session of the 2014 NASSR Supernumerary Conference “Romantic Connections.”
“Digital Digressions: A Computational Approach to Eighteenth-Century Narrative Theory” presented at the 2014 ASECS conference.
“Fragments of Fiction: Heterogeneity and the Early Novel in the Digital Archive” presented at the “Comparative Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature” Division at the 2014 MLA convention.
“Digital Romanticism” presented in the special session “Theory for Romanticism” at the 2013 NASSR conference.
“The Book History BiblioGraph,” presented in the Digital Project Showcase of the 2013 Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP) conference.
“Tropes, Context and Computation: An approach to digital poetics” presented at the 2013 Digital Humanities conference.
“Finding the place of race in anthropological discourse: a digital textual analysis” presented at the plenary session of the 2013 American Association of Physical Anthropologists conference.
“The Topological Turn: New Strategies of Visual Reading in the Eighteenth Century” presented to the Digital Humanities Caucus at the 2013 ASECS conference.
“The Humanist in the Lab” presented at the special session “Theories and Practices of the Literary Lab” at the 2013 MLA conference.
“The Werther Effect: Topologies of Eighteenth-Century Literature” presented at the 2012 Canadian Society for Digital Humanities conference.
“Tracing the Sublime: A Computer-Assisted Reading of Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics” presented at the 2012 ASECS conference.
“The Werther Effect I: Goethe Topologically” presented at the Washington University Symposium “Distant Readings/Descriptive Turns,” March 2012.
“The Book History BiblioGraph: A New Approach to Visualizing the Scholarly Research Archive” presented in the special session “Textual Remediation” at the 2012 MLA conference.
“The Mathematics of Beauty: Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics and the Language of Computation” presented at the 2011 CSECS conference.
“Romantic Digressions: Reception Control in Romantic Poetry” presented at the 2011 NASSR Conference “Romanticism and Independence”
“The Language of Landscapes: A Digital Approach to Romantic Poetics” presented at the 2011 BARS conference “Enlightenment, Romanticism and Nation.”
“From Texts to Charts and Back Again: New Strategies for Interpretation in the Digital Humanities” presented to the 2010 ASECS Conference Digital Humanities Caucus.
“Media, Materiality and the Stage: Howard, Fielding and the Performance of Print” presented at the 2010 CSECS conference “”Charting the 18th Century.”
“The Production of Genius: Encoded Theories of Print in Romantic Poetics” presented at the 2010 NASSR Conference “Romantic Mediation.”
“Publishing as Recursive Agency: The Network of Printed Responses to Print” invited guest presentation at the 2010 McGill Workshop conference “Print, Agency and Interaction.”
“Simulating Reason in a Non-Rational World: Thompson’s Anti-Enlightenment Poetics” presented at the 2010 ASECS Conference.
“[T]he Wond’rous art of writing”: Literature and the Legacy of Romantic Self-Criticism” presented at the 2009 NASSR conference “Romanticism and Modernity.”
“’Sleeping in the Lap of Horror’: Representations of Violence in the Aesthetics of the Picturesque” presented at the 2008 NASSR conference “Romantic Diversity.”
“Sustaining Narrative: Sublime Trauma and the Poetics of Deferral,” presented at the research conference, “Trauma and the Sublime,” Swansea University, 2008.
“‘The garden of the world’: Self Discovery and National Identity in the Experience of the Sublime” presented at the 2008 NASSR supernumerary conference “(Trans)National Identities / Reimagining Communities” The University of Bologna, Italy.
“Reading the Eighteenth Century by the Numbers: Toward a New Quantitative Approach to the Sublime in Literature” presented to the Eighteenth-Century Division of the MLA, 2007.
Recent Teaching Experience
Assistant Professor, Department of English, Stanford University
“Networks of Enlightenment” Graduate seminar that instructed students in computational network theory (using Gephi) to construct literary networks from Eighteenth-Century drama and novels. Winter, 2014.
“Data and Knowledge in the Humanities” Seminar course cross-listed with English and Science, Technology, Society program on the ways in which the introduction of data in to Humanities study changes the ways in which knowledge is created. Winter, 2014
“The Grotesque: Our Attraction to the Aesthetics of the Unnatural” Upper level seminar course that investigated the “grotesque” as a phenomenon of modernity across media from the 18th through 21st centuries. Fall, 2014.
Research Associate, Department of English, Stanford University
“Meaning and Mining: Method and Interpretation in the Digital Humanities” Graduate Seminar course that combines instruction in statistical and computational methodologies with critical approaches to large corpora of literary texts. Winter, 2014.
“Critical Text Mining” Undergraduate seminar course that instructs students in the methodologies and theories of the Digital Humanities, particularly as applied to the quantitative analysis of literature. Fulfills University “Quantitative Analysis” undergraduate requirement. Department of English, Fall 2013.
“Suspense and Fear in Literature: Digitally Decoding a Literary Effect” Undergraduate seminar that combines readings on the narratological basis of suspense with Digital Humanities approaches to text mining and network analysis on “suspense” novels and short stories. Department of English, Spring 2013.
“Mapping the Romantic Geographic Imagination” Fourth year undergraduate seminar that combines close readings of space and place in Romantic period texts with GIS based spatial humanities methods. Department of English, Fall 2012.
Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, McGill University, Montreal
“The Fragment: Form, Logic, Resistance” Third year undergraduate theory course on the the literature and philosophy of the German Enlightenment and Romantic periods. Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures. Fall 2011.
“Literature of the Romantic Period 2.” Third year undergraduate survey course of Late Romantic Period Literature, team taught with Professor Monique Morgan. Department of English, Spring 2011.
“The Grotesque: Studies in the Bizarre and Unnatural.” Third year undergraduate theory course focusing on the Grotesque in German media (literature, art and film). Department of German. Fall 2010.
“Studies in the Eighteenth Century: Technologies of Enlightenment.” Fourth-year undergraduate seminar on Enlightenment literature and Philosophy. Department of English. Spring 2010
Instructor, Rutgers University, New Brunswick
“Profanity and Politics on the English Stage.” Intensive seminar course for fourth-year English majors on Restoration and Eighteenth-Century drama. Spring, 2009.
“Late Romantic Period Literature.” Survey course in Romantic Period Literature focusing on the work of the “Younger” Romantic poets and other writers of the Regency period. Spring 2009.
“Late Eighteenth-Century Literature and the Enlightenment. Upper-level undergraduate course in the philosophy and literature of the Enlightenment, Spring 2009.
“Restoration and Early Eighteenth-Century Literature.” Upper-level undergraduate survey course, Fall 2008.
“Introduction to Literature.” Introductory course in literary and media studies for non- English majors, Fall 2008.
“Truth and Beauty in the Twentieth Century.” Undergraduate Literary theory course introducing students to concepts of aesthetics from the Victorian period to the present, Fall 2008.
Professional Affiliations
Executive Board Member, 18thConnect, 2015-present.
Chair, Lois M. Fortier Prize Committee, Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO), 2015.
Awards Committee Member, Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO), 2014 present.
International Executive Interim Board Member, CenterNET: International Association of Digital Humanities Centers, 2013-2015.