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; CLARIN; D-SPIN; 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.
Matthew Kirschenbaum
Associate Director
Matthew Kirschenbaum is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Maryland. He is also an affiliated faculty member with the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at Maryland, and a Vice President of the Electronic Literature Organization. Kirschenbaum specializes in digital humanities, electronic literature, virtual worlds, serious games and simulations, textual studies, and postmodern/experimental literature. His first book, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination, was published by the MIT Press in 2008. Much of his work at MITH now focuses on born-digital archiving and preservation: he is principal investigator for the NEH funded start-up "Approaches to Managing and Collecting Born-Digital Literary Materials for Scholarly Use" and is also a co-investigator on an NDIIPP-funded project devoted to Preserving Virtual Worlds. He oversees work on the Deena Larsen collection, a vast personal archive of hardware and software furnishing a cross-section of the electronic writing community during its key formative years, roughly 1985-1995. He is Articles Editor for Digital Humanities Quarterly and serves on the editorial or advisory boards of a number of projects and publications, including Postmodern Culture, Text Technology, Textual Cultures, and MediaCommons. He is a regular contributor to the Chronicle Review section of the Chronicle of Higher Education. For more information, see his blog.
Doug Reside
Assistant Director
Doug Reside (assistant director) holds undergraduate degrees in Computer Science and English and earned his PhD in English at the University of Kentucky where he worked on several digital humanities projects, including Kevin Kiernan's celebrated Electronic Boethius. Doug's primary research interest is musical theater and the way in which digital technology can be used both to create and to preserve the art form. In addition to his managerial, and programming work at MITH, Doug is currently working on a book on the "born-digital" musical. In December of 2009 Reside will host the fourth annual Song, Stage, and Screen conference (the international meeting of record for musical theater studies) in College Park.
Gregory Lord
Web Designer & Web Programmer
Gregory Lord is MITH's Web Designer & Web Programmer. He holds a BA in English from the University of Maryland where he studied creative writing and focused his work upon hypertext and interactive literature Since joining MITH in 2005, Greg has created the web and graphic designs and interfaces for MITH's in-house and fellows projects, and lends his skills as a web programmer to the design and implementation of MITH's many web applications.
Christina Grogan
Business Coordinator
Christina Grogan joined MITH in 2008 as the Business Coordinator. She holds a BA in History from The Ohio State University, and an MBA from the University of Tennessee. As Business Coordinator, Chris manages the budget, grant accounts, payroll, travel, and other accounting and office management functions for the Institute. Prior to joining MITH, Chris spent four years as the Program Coordinator for the Neuroscience and Cognitive Science (NACS) Program (www.nacs.umd.edu) here on campus, and two years as a Grants and Contracts Coordinator in the Psychology Department (www.bsos.umd.edu/psyc).
helen DeVinney
Managing Director of the ELO
helen DeVinney is a PhD student in the English department at the University of Maryland. She specializes in 20th Century American literature and is interested in questions related to textual studies, literary theory, and the digital humanities. She has an MA in English from the University of Maryland and an MAT in Secondary English with a focus on urban education from Johns Hopkins University. Her first publication appears in the F. Scott Fitzgerald Review. helen manages the ELO office, which recently moved from UCLA to MITH.
Carl Stahmer
Research Associate
Carl Stahmer currently holds a Research Associate appointment at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, University of Maryland, and a Research Scientist appointment at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Stahmer holds a Ph.D. in English from UCSB; his dissertation, “Romanticism, Hypertextuality, and Metavisual Information Theory,” investigates the relationship between contemporary hypertext theory and Romantic period theories of poetic function. In addition to creating and maintaining a host of academic Web sites, he has also worked as a computer programmer and system architect for a variety of governmental, academic, and commercial technology initiatives over the past twenty years. Stahmer is a founding General Editor for the Romantic Circles Website and was the lead developer for an NEH Teaching with Technology Grant that provided funding for the development of an interactive virtual space for teaching Romantic period poetry in high schools (Romantic Circles High School). Stahmer also programmed the search functionality for the first Voice of the Shuttle Web site for Humanities Research. From 2001-2004, he then served as Director of Technology for Lynchinteractive Inc., where he was lead developer and system architect for a variety of internet-based, advanced data-integration solutions, including distance learning and government information systems. He also currently serves on the Steering Committee for the Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship (NINES) initiative.
Grant Dickie
Web Programmer
Grant Dickie, recent graduate of University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Information Science Master's Program (http://sils.unc.edu), joined MITH as a web programmer. While an undergraduate at University of Richmond, he studied English and German comparative literature. While working as a student for the University of Richmond Boatwright Library, Grant worked alongside Dr. Andrew Rouner and Chris Kemp on the Richmond Daily Dispatch project (http://dlxs.richmond.edu/d/ddr/) as well as other digital initiatives. In addition, he has also digitized and encoded the Anna Burwell 1855-1856 diary for the Historic Burwell School site in Hillsborough, North Carolina.
Beth Bonsignore
Program Associate
Beth Bonsignore is a phD student at Maryland's iSchool, and a Graduate Assistant at MITH. She is currently focused on processing and presentation of documents for the DigitalDocket, a project which aims to apply computational linguistics techniques to facilitate the study of the U.S. Supreme Court. Beth is interested in research regarding information sharing among communities of learning, specifically digital literacies & storytelling, knowledge re/presentation, and social network analysis. Having traveled the world with the U.S. Navy and federal government, she now relishes seeing the world through new lenses with her two young sons.
Rachel Donahue
Program Associate
Rachel Donahue is a doctoral student at the University of Maryland's iSchool, researching the preservation of complex, interactive digital objects. She received a BA in English and Illustration from Juniata College in 2004, and an MLS from UMD in 2009. Rachel is a Graduate Assistant in MITH, working on the Preserving Virtual Worlds project, as well as an intern at the National Archives with the Electronic Records Archives program. In the past she has also helped NARA's Electronic and Special Media Records division verify and describe electronic records. Her first taste of the internet was accessing Usenet through a VT100 terminal and Tin, quickly followed by MUDs and IRC, and a solid addiction to social networking sites. She started playing video games with Sesame Street and a keyboard cover for the Commodore 64 and hasn't stopped since.
Gary Phillips
Consultant
Gary Phillips performs system administration for MITH.
Tapan Khatri
Program Associate
Tapan Khatri is a Graduate Student in Telecommunications and holds a Bachelor's Degree in Electronics Engineering. He has an exposure to diversified industry verticals like manufacturing, telecommunications, contact center and enterprise telephony. Tapan traversed his journey to Avaya GCL, one of the leading enterprise telephony company, and served Avaya for the period of one year as a Technical Consultant. Tapan is working on the Our Americas grant and assisting with development of Web Applications and Graphics Design.
Elisabeth Kvernen
Web Designer
Elisabeth Kvernen is a web designer at MITH. She holds a Master of Fine Arts degree in Integrated Design from the University of Baltimore, where she focused on print, web and video design. Her thesis project, calligraphyqalam.com, uses interactive tools to introduce students of the Arabic language to Arabic, Ottoman and Persian calligraphy. At MITH she creates web designs and interfaces for a variety of projects.
Diana Aram
Intern
Diana Aram is a Master of Library Science student at the University of Maryland's iSchool and is currently serving as an intern at MITH. She received her BA in English at the University of Florida. Diana is interested in how computing and technology are used in order to compliment and expand traditional approaches to the humanities and scholarship in general. She is also preoccupied with how organization and interface can quickly facilitate or complicate the discovery process. In addition to her studies and work at MITH, Diana works as a student assistant in Vertical Files at the National Gallery of Art library.
Nikolas Coukouma
Web Programmer
Nikolas Coukouma studied computer science, film and Japanese linguistics, for six years at the University of Maryland. At MITH he writes Firefox extensions and web applications. Nikolas contributes to a variety of FLOSS software projects and teaches workshops. In his spare time Nikolas plays board games and tames small dragons.
Becca Hale
Accounting Assistant
Becca Hale joined MITH in the summer of 2009 as Christina Grogan's Accounting Assistant. She is currently an undergraduate student here at the University of Maryland, majoring in Accounting. She mainly works with Chris to help manage the budget, grant accounts, payroll, and travel accounts, as well as other things to ensure the office runs smoothly. While she is a fairly recent addition to MITH, she is thoroughly enjoying being a part of this exciting field.
