MITH Staff

Directors

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  Neil Fraistat

  Director

  Neil Fraistat, Professor of English at the University of Maryland, received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. He has published widely on the subjects of Romanticism, Textual Studies, and Digital Humanities in such journals as PMLA, JEGP, Studies in Romanticism, Text, and Literary and Linguistic Computing, as well as in such books as The Poem and the Book, Poems in Their Place, and The "Prometheus Unbound" Notebooks. A founder and general editor of the Romantic Circles Website, he is the coeditor of Reimagining Textuality: Textual Studies in the Late Age of Print; The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley (2 vols. to date); the Norton Critical edition, Shelley's Poetry and Prose; an edition of Helen Maria Williams's Letters Written in France, and the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Textual Scholarship. Fraistat is Co-chair of centerNet, an international network of digital humanities centers, and currently serves on the boards of the Association of Computers and the Humanities (ACH); the Society for Textual Scholarship; the Keats-Shelley Association; Project MUSE; NITLE Digital Humanities Council; Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth Century Electronic Scholarship (NINES); Brown's Women Writer's Project; Studies in Romanticism; and Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net (RaVoN). He has been awarded the Society for Textual Scholarship's biennial Fredson Bowers Memorial Prize, the Keats-Shelley Association Prize, honorable mention for the Modern Language Association's biennial Distinguished Scholarly Edition Prize, and the Keats-Shelley Association's Distinguished Scholar Award.
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  Matthew Kirschenbaum

  Associate Director

  Matthew G. Kirschenbaum is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Maryland and Associate Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH, an applied thinktank for the digital humanities). He is also an affiliated faculty member with the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at Maryland, and a member of the teaching faculty at the University of Virginia’s Rare Book School. His first book, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination, was published by the MIT Press in 2008 and won the 2009 Richard J. Finneran Award from the Society for Textual Scholarship (STS), the 2009 George A. and Jean S. DeLong Prize from the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP), and the 16th annual Prize for a First Book from the Modern Language Association (MLA). In 2010 he co-authored (with Richard Ovenden and Gabriela Redwine) Digital Forensics and Born-Digital Content in Cultural Heritage Collections, a report published by the Council on Library and Information Resources. Kirschenbaum speaks and writes often on topics in the digital humanities and new media; his work has received coverage in the Atlantic, New York Times, National Public Radio,Wired, Boing Boing, Slashdot, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. He is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow. See www.mkirschenbaum.net for more.
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  Trevor Munoz

  Associate Director

  Trevor Muñoz is Associate Director of MITH as well as Assistant Dean for Digital Humanities Research at the University of Maryland Libraries. Trevor holds an MA in Digital Humanities from the Department of Digital Humanities at King's College London and a MS in Library and Information Science from the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He specializes in curation of humanities data, with a particular emphasis on developing joint research ventures between the Libraries, MITH, and other academic faculty at Maryland. Trevor is co-editor of a forthcoming guide to Data Curation Best Practices in the Humanities and co-organized the first Humanities Data Curation Summit intended to promote the development of a sustainable plan for preserving digital humanities research.
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  Jennifer Guiliano

  Assistant Director

  Jennifer Guiliano is Assistant Director at MITH, leading development activities including grant writing and staff coordination, and a Center Affiliate of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Jennifer received a Masters of Arts in History from Miami University (2002), and a Masters of Arts (2004) in American History from the University of Illinois before completing her Ph.D. in History at the University of Illinois (2010). She has previously served as Associate Director of the Center for Digital Humanities, at the University of South Carolina where she was also a Research Assistant Professor of History. Jennifer is interested in image analytics associated with authorship related questions, and how computing transforms both the questions humanists can ask as well as the answers that can be generated with digital tools, methods, and pedagogies.
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  Travis Brown

  Assistant Director

  Travis Brown is Assistant Director of Research and Development. He holds an M.A. in English from the University of Texas at Austin and is beginning a dissertation on the use of digital tools and methods in literary studies. While at the University of Texas he worked as an editor for the Walt Whitman Archive and was the lead developer of eComma, a web application for collaborative textual annotation. He also participated in a range of projects in UT’s Computational Linguistics Lab, where he developed tools for dependency parsing, semantic role labeling, and toponym resolution. He is particularly interested in using techniques from computational linguistics to aid in the exploration and visualization of large collections of literary and historical texts.

Finance and Administration

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  Christina Lambert

  Business Manager

  As Business Manager for MITH, Chris handles all the accounting, budget, facilities, human resources, payroll, and travel needs for the Institute. She is also the research administrator for the unit, managing both pre- and post-award research functions. Chris is a member of the National Council of University Research Administrators (NCURA), and co-presented a session entitled "Hot Topics in Departmental Research Administration" at the Pre-Award Research Administration 4 conference in Providence, RI, in July 2010. Prior to joining MITH in 2008, Chris spent four years as the Program Coordinator for the Neuroscience and Cognitive Science (NACS) Program (www.nacs.umd.edu), and two years as a Grants and Contracts Coordinator in the Psychology Department (www.bsos.umd.edu/psyc). She holds an MBA from the University of Tennessee, and a BA in History from The Ohio State University.
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  Kristin Cesario

  Office Assistant

  Kristin Cesario is a student at the University of Maryland, College Park. Originally from Calvert County, MD, Kristin is a Criminal Justice/Criminology major and an Italian minor.
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  Karen O’Brien

  Business Assistant

  Karen O’Brien is Business Assistant at MITH. Before joining MITH, she worked at the Food and Drug Administration for 37 years until she recently retired. As an FDA Director, Division of Budget and Resource Management, Center for Biologics, Evaluation, and Research, she was responsible for formulating proposed out-year budget submissions and then executing appropriated funds received each fiscal year. She holds a M.S.B from John’s Hopkins University and a B.A. from the University of Maryland.
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  Sahil Patni

  Accounting Assistant

  Sahil is a senior at the Robert H. Smith School of Business pursuing a bachelors degree in finance and international business. He is also a minor in philosophy and treasurer of an on-campus dance team called TerraPind Bhangra.

Staff

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  Seth Denbo

  Project Coordinator

  Seth is Project Coordinator for Bamboo Corpora Space at MITH. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom and is a cultural historian of eighteenth-century England. Before coming to MITH he has worked on projects in digital history, the AHRC ICT Programme in Arts and Humanities and been Research Associate at King’s College London where he has been involved in strategic planning for a major European digital research infrastructure. He is also a convenor of a new seminar in digital history at the Institute for Historical Research.
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  Grant Dickie

  Web Programmer

  Grant Dickie is a Web Programmer for MITH. Previous to working at MITH, Grant worked on the digital archive for the Richmond Daily Dispatch Project while an undergraduate at University of Richmond. A graduate of the School of Information and Library Science in Chapel Hill, he specializes in providing functionality for web application interfaces. Examples of his work can be found at the Shakespeare Quartos Archive interface and the Archimedes Palimpsest interface for the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore.
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  Kirsten Keister

  Web Designer

  Kirsten holds a Bachelor of Art in Graphic Design from Gordon College, where she acquired a strong background in fine art and photography. She also gained valuable professional experience by interning at Return Design, an entrepreneurial firm that serves non-profit and art-related clients. After graduation, Kirsten joined the Design Center at her alma mater where she worked with a small team to provide design support for college departments and administrative offices. In 2008, she founded Lamppost Creative, a sole proprietorship that offers a wide range of graphic design services to clients primarily in the Washington, DC and Boston, MA metro areas. When she’s not in front of the computer creating fresh, smart and meaningful designs for clients, she continues to put her education to good use either in her art studio or out taking photographs.
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  Dave Lester

  Creative Lead

  Dave Lester is Creative Lead at MITH, and a masters student at the UC Berkeley iSchool. Dave previously worked at the Center for History & New Media, where he coordinated software development Outreach for Omeka, and co-organized THATCamp, an annual digital humanities "unconference" bringing together practitioners to collaborate and share their work. Before returning to school, he was Assistant Director at MITH and organized the NEH-funded MITH API workshop.
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  Emma Millon

  Community Lead

  Emma Millon is Community Lead at MITH. She serves as the communications representative and outreach coordinator for Project Bamboo, and various other MITH projects. Prior to arriving at MITH, Emma worked for three years as text-encoder and project manager for the Accademia di San Luca research database at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature and Italian from Harvard College.
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  Jim Smith

  Software Architect

  Jim holds a M.A. in English as well as an undergraduate degree in Mathematics and Physics. Before joining MITH, he was the Digital Humanities Lead Developer for the Digital Humanities Program in the Texas A&M University College of Liberal Arts where he was responsible for building and deploying infrastructure to support the digital humanities. As part of his work at Texas A&M University, Jim developed a digital humanities platform that is serving as a foundational element in a course he will be teaching at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) 2011 on “Data Discovery, Management, and Presentation.
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  Amanda Visconti

  Webmaster

  Amanda is a Ph.D. student in the University of Maryland's Department of English, where she focuses on creating and theorizing digital texts as spaces of literary play, participation, and discovery. She holds a master's degree with a specialization in the digital humanities from the University of Michigan School of Information. Amanda returns to MITH after an IMLS Digital Humanities Model Internship in Summer 2009, when she worked with MITH Associate Director Matt Kirschenbaum to ready the DLC for in-person and remote use. As webmaster, Amanda works toward developing a MITH policy for the handling of digital humanities projects throughout their life-cycles as well as documenting the history of the MITH staff and community members who contributed to these works. She also works as a graduate research assistant on a study of the design and educational use of alternate reality games (ARGs) at UMD's iSchool.
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  Evan Wang

  Technical Assistant

  Evan is currently an undergraduate student at the University of Maryland. He is pursuing a double degree in computer science and finance. Originally from Richmond, Virginia, Evan graduated from Maggie L. Walker Governor's School. Before working at MITH, he worked as a programmer at Ameronix, a small web design company. He avidly keeps up with the news and web trends.

Research Associates

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  David Brookshire

  Manuscripts Transcription Editor, Shelley-Godwin Archive

  David Brookshire is Manuscripts Transcription Editor for the Shelley Godwin Archive. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland, where he is currently a Lecturer and Research Associate in the Department of English. Within the broad field of British literature of the eighteenth century, his scholarly interests focus on the resonances among Romantic, Gothic, and Enlightenment discourses; textual scholarship and editing; and the development of digital resources for the study of primary manuscripts. Brookshire is a member of the editorial team for The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley. He is also the editor, and a contributor, for Percy Shelley and the De-limitation of the Gothic, a forthcoming volume of essays in the Romantic Circles Praxis Series.
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  Rachel Donahue

  Research Associate

  Rachel Donahue is a doctoral student at the University of Maryland's iSchool, researching the preservation of complex, interactive digital objects (which may or may not be a fancy way of saying “videogames”). While this sounds very technical (and can be), the social factors involved—from the complexities of intellectual property to seemingly simple semantic variance—often prove to be the real challenge. She received a BA in English and Illustration from Juniata College in 2004, and an MLS with a specialization in archival science from University of Maryland in 2009. Rachel is a Research Assistant at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH), currently supporting the second phase of Preserving Virtual Worlds project. In 2009, she was elected for a 3-year term to the Society of American Archivists (SAA) Electronic Records Section steering committee.
  
  When not otherwise occupied, Rachel dabbles in open [source/access/courseware] issues, professional use of social media, [alternate/augmented] reality, thinking about other gaps that need bridging, and drawing an archives themed webcomic.
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  Porter Olsen

  Research Associate

  Porter is a Ph.D. candidate in the English Department at the University of Maryland. His research focuses on the intersections between postcolonial literature and digital cultures, with a particular interest in how both fields deploy virtual spaces as spaces of alterity and resistance. Before returning to graduate school, Porter worked as a technical support manager and product manager for a Linux distribution developer. As product manager, Porter was a member of the United Linux initiative, an initiative designed to create a single Linux platform shared among distributors from Germany, Brazil, the U.S., and Japan. His dissertation is under the direction of professors Matthew G. Kirschenbaum and Sangeeta Ray.
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  Lisa Marie Antonille Rhody

  Winnemore Dissertation Fellow

  Lisa Rhody is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she also earned her M.A. She received a B.A. in English from Denison University. Her research interests include 20th and 21st century literature, poetry, visual culture, and the digital humanities. She is a speaker in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts speaker series, served as a coordinator for the Freshman Writing Program at the University of Maryland, and recently was the Archives and Communication Coordinator at the Center for Teaching Excellence. Her research in digital humanities has included four years as a site manager for the scholarly website Romantic Circles, prior to that she also worked for The Dickinson Electronic Archive and for The Women's Studies Database through the Office of Information Technology. Currently, she is completing her dissertation, "Revising Ekphrasis: Models of Verbal-Visual Networks in Women's Contemporary Poetry," in which she argues that computational methods such as textual and network analysis can help scholars challenge existing assumptions about the genre's tradition, tropes, and canon.
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  Wenfei Zhou

  Intern, Shelley-Godwin Archive

  Wenfei is a senior at the University of Maryland majoring in English Language and Literature with a French minor. He likes to read, write, and eventually fall into sleep. He dreams in different languages and has a penchant for everything foreign. When in the basement of the library, he works at MITH as an intern trying to solve the mystery of Shelley's handwriting.

Resident Fellows

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  Hayim Lapin

  Resident Fellow

  Hayim Lapin is the Robert H. Smith Professor of Jewish Studies and a Professor in the Department of History at the University of Maryland. He received his PhD from Columbia University. Hayim's research has been at the intersection of classical Jewish texts (especially legal texts) and social and cultural history. His most recent book is on the development of the rabbinic movement in Palestine in the third and fourth centuries of the Common Era (AD) seen from the perspective of Roman provincial history. His current project, drawing on the same body of literature, is a digital scholarly edition of a principal legal text known as the Mishnah.
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  Peter Mallios

  Resident Fellow

  Peter Mallios is Associate Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Maryland, with a background in law. His specializes in twentieth century American literature, culture, and politics, with particular interests in the modern novel, the reception and significance of foreign literature in the U.S., and relations between American literature and law. He is the author of Our Conrad: Constituting American Modernity (Stanford University Press, 2010), a literary and cultural history of the reception of the Polish-English novelist Joseph Conrad in the U.S.
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  Carla L. Peterson

  Resident Fellow

  Carla L. Peterson is a professor in the Department of English at the University of Maryland, and affiliate faculty of the departments of Women’s Studies, American Studies, and African-American Studies. Peterson received her undergraduate degree from Radcliffe College and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Yale University. She is the author of “Doers of the Word”: African-American Women Speakers and Writers in the North (1830-1880) (Rutgers University Press, 1998). She has published numerous essays on nineteenth-century African American literature and culture. Her newly published book, titled Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City (Yale University Press, 2011), is a social and cultural history of African Americans in nineteenth-century New York City as seen through the lens of family history.