Personal Mention

Kristina Straub recently contributed to an opinion piece for The Washington Post called “‘Will & Jane’: Making literary celebrity work for the humanities.” In the piece, Straub and her co-author, Janine Barchas, describe the process of curating their “Will & Jane” exhibit at the Folger Shakespeare Library. They credited the experience with reaffirming the importance of the humanities as the core of university life and urged other professors to collaborate in similar ways. Straub is an English professor and director of the literary and cultural studies program at CMU. Barchas is an English professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Read the full piece.

The University of Cambridge has accepted Pierce Williams, a Ph.D. student in literary and cultural studies, as a visiting scholar for the fall 2017 semester. There, he will research and write his dissertation on the ways that scientific texts shaped the cultural impact of science in the 18th century. “I’m working with cultural theory, book history, performance studies and digital humanities methods to think about science as public culture during the Enlightenment,” said Williams, a 2016 A.W. Mellon Fellow in digital humanities. Read a Q&A with Williams about Cambridge’s visiting scholars program.

David Kaufer co-wrote an editorial for the Conversation that addresses the reasons many people believe Hillary Clinton is inauthentic. In the piece, Kaufer and Shawn Parry-Giles examined this view of Clinton through the lenses of gender politics, partisan politics, press politics and Clinton’s political guardedness — a theme that also appears in the co-authors’ recent research. In a new study published in the National Communication Association’s Quarterly Journal of Speech, Kaufer and Parry-Giles analyzed Clinton’s two political memoirs using the CMU-developed digital humanities tool, DocuScope, to identify examples of Clinton’s private nature. Kaufer is the Paul Mellon Distinguished Professor of English in CMU’s Dietrich College and Parry-Giles is a professor of communication at the University of Maryland. Read “Why do so many people believe Hillary Clinton is inauthentic?”

Vincent Aleven, associate professor of human-computer interaction, was recently the keynote speaker at two international education conferences. Aleven presented “Adaptivity in Learning Technologies: Kinds, Effectiveness and Authoring” at the European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning in Lyons, France. In mid-October, he gave a talk on “Building Intelligent Tutoring Systems” at the Center for Education and Learning meeting in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Learn more about his work.