Faculty

Faculty Director

The Faculty Director of Digital Studies is David Schloen. He is a Professor of Archaeology in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations of the University of Chicago, where he has been teaching since 1994. He specializes in the archaeology and history of the ancient Levant in the Bronze and Iron Ages and conducts excavations at sites in Turkey, Israel, and Spain.

David Schloen has extensive experience in applying computational methods to textual and archaeological research and teaches the Digital Studies core course on  “Introduction to Digital Humanities” (DIGS 30007). He holds a doctorate in archaeology and ancient Semitic languages from Harvard University and a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of Toronto. In the area of digital humanities, he is particularly interested in the digital representation of scholarly knowledge (ontologies) and the philosophical issues raised by this endeavor. In close collaboration with Sandra Schloen, he has created a generic top-level ontology that subsumes heterogeneous local ontologies and enables data integration across projects while faithfully representing all of the individual conceptual distinctions and scholarly practices characteristic of the humanities. His ideas on this score are implemented in a computational platform called OCHRE (Online Cultural and Historical Research Environment), which supports all stages of research, from initial data acquisition to the final publication and archiving of the data, and allows comprehensive querying and analysis that span many disparate sources of information.

Faculty Advisory Board

A broadly based faculty board oversees the Program in Digital Studies of Language, Culture, and History. The members of this board are drawn from sixteen different departments in the University of Chicago, representing every discipline in the humanities. They have a wide range of interests and experience in creating software tools for the humanities or in using and evaluating digital technology in their research and teaching.

• Niall Atkinson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art History and the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures. He studies the art and architecture of the Italian Renaissance, with a particular focus on the experience of artistic environments and urban spaces in late medieval and Renaissance Italy. He is the co-director of a digital mapping project on Visualizing the Changing Spatial and Social Ecology of Renaissance Florence.
• Helma Dik is an Associate Professor in the Department of Classics. She studies Greek language and linguistics, Greek prose style, and corpus linguistics. She is engaged in digital projects pertaining to classical philology in collaboration with the Perseus Digital Library, one result of which is the Perseus under PhiloLogic tool developed at the University of Chicago.
• Allyson Ettinger is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics. She specializes in computational linguistics and psycholinguistics. She uses digital methods to model and test hypotheses about mechanisms underlying the way our brains process language in real time.
• Lenore Grenoble is the John Matthews Manly Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Linguistics and the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. She specializes in sociolinguistics and studies language contact and shift in multilingual settings, with particular attention to Arctic Indigenous language communities (e.g., Greenlandic and Inuit).
• Faith Hillis is a Professor of Russian History in the Department of History. She studies modern Russian and European history and is interested in using digital tools to answer historical questions.
• Travis Jackson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Music. He studies ethnomusicology and jazz, rock, and world music.
• Patrick Jagoda is a Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature and the Department of Cinema and Media Studies. He studies new media (e.g., digital games, electronic literature, etc.) and twentieth- and twenty-first century American literature and culture. He is the director of the Weston Game Lab in the University of Chicago’s Media Arts, Data, and Design Center and director of the undergraduate major and minor in Media Arts and Design.
• Hoyt Long is a Professor of Japanese Literature in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations and co-director of the Textual Optics Lab. He studies modern Japan, cultural analytics, and the sociology and history of literature and other media.
• Ellen MacKay is an Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature and the Committee on Theater and Performance Studies. She studies Shakespeare and other early modern English literature, and theater theory and performance. She is a co-director of the multi-project CEDAR initiative.
• Robert Morrissey is the Benjamin Franklin Professor of French Literature in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures and co-director of the Textual Optics Lab. He studies French literature and history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and is the director of the ARTFL Project, which sponsored the development of the PhiloLogic system for full-text search and retrieval.
• Constantine Nakassis is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology. He is a linguistic anthropologist with interests in semiotics, film theory, mass media, brands, and youth culture. His regional focus is Tamil Nadu, India.
• Jason Salavon is an Associate Professor in the Department of Visual Arts. He is an artist who uses software processes of his own design to produce art objects and installations that have been exhibited in museums and galleries around the world. He is the founder of the Hack Arts Lab in the University of Chicago’s Media Arts, Data, and Design Center.
• Haun Saussy is University Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations and the Committee on Social Thought. He studies classical Chinese poetry and literary theory and pre-twentieth-century media history.
• Adam Shaw is an Associate Senior Instructional Professor in the Department of Computer Science. He does research on programming languages and has many years of experience teaching introductory courses in computer science.
• Jeffrey Stackert is a Professor of Hebrew Bible in the Divinity School and Associate Faculty in the Department of Classics and the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. His research focuses especially on the composition of the Pentateuch, ancient Near Eastern prophecy, cultic texts, and ancient Near Eastern law. He is a co-director of the multi-project CEDAR initiative.
• Ulrike Stark is a Professor in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations. She is a scholar of modern Hindi literature and South Asian book history. Her main research interests are in the cultural and intellectual history of North India in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with a specific focus on print culture, public intellectual life, education, and gender. She is also the originator and principal investigator of a digital humanities project titled Chapakhana: Mapping the Spread of Print in South Asia.
• Malte Willer is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy. He specializes in the philosophy of language and philosophical logic, and specifically the dynamic perspective on discourse and reasoning. In the area of digital studies, he is interested in the philosophical issues raised by artificial intelligence, including the philosophical critique of “good old-fashioned AI” (symbolic AI) and the epistemology of deep learning.