Mandell appointed as Director of the Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture

• Laura Mandell, professor of English, has been named the new Director of the Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture in the College of Liberal Arts at Texas A&M University.
• The Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture encourages critical thinking about new roles of media, ranging from social life to global politics. It seeks to investigate the relationship of computing technologies and culture and the need to construct cyber infrastructure for the humanities and social sciences.

Laura Mandell, professor of English, has been named the new Director Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture effective June 1, 2011.

"The Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture will support scholars in a wide range of academic disciplines including literature, history, art and architecture, archaeology, communications, and computer science researchers who are creating new scholarly, poetic artistic, and musical forms," Mandell says. "Fellowships and programming expertise will be given to a faculty working on digital resources. Workshops, events, and speakers will encourage critical thinking about the role of new media in everything from social life to global politics."

Additionally the initiative seeks to investigate the relationship of computing technologies and culture and the need to construct cyber infrastructure for the humanities and social sciences.

Mandell is the author of Misogynous Economies: The Business of Literature in Eighteenth-Century Britain (1999) and specializes in 18th and 19th century literature and Digital Humanities. She also is the editor of Longman Cultural Edition of The Castle of Otranto and Man of Feeling and several articles regarding women writers. She edits the Poetess Archive, an online database on women poets; serves as associate director of NINES; and is a director of 18th Connect, an online network for 18th century scholars.

Mandell is currently researching and developing methods for visualizing poetry, developing software that will allow all scholars to deep-code documents, and improving OCR software for early modern 18th century texts through cluster computing.

Mandell received her Ph.D in English from Cornell University.