Porter Olsen is a research assistant who has been with MITH since the fall of 2011. From October of 2013 to September of 2014 he served as a full-time research faculty member as the Community Lead on the BitCurator project, a Mellon funded project to bring digital forensics tools and techniques to collecting institutions working with born-digital material. Simultaneously, he is a Ph.D. candidate in the English Department at the University of Maryland studying digital humanities and postcolonial literature.
His dissertation, titled “Hacking the Empire: Reading the Digital in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Postcolonial Literature,” studies hacker culture in the global south and how the hacker ethos is represented in later 20th and early 21st century postcolonial fiction under the direction of Dr. Matthew Kirschenbaum. Porter teaches classes on electronic literature and globalization and has been recognized for his contributions to the growing online teaching program in the university’s English department.
Before returning to graduate school, Porter worked as product manager on the United Linux initiative, an effort to create a single Linux platform shared among distributors from Germany, Brazil, the U.S., and Japan.
Past Staff
