Meet Our (New) Graduate Students!

As we gear up to kick off the Fall semester with fabulous workshops, consultations, lectures, and funding opportunities, we at the CDH wanted to give you the chance to meet some of our graduate students. Read their guest blog posts below to learn more about their research and what led them to work with the CDH, and be sure to look for them around campus!

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I’m Mary Naydan, a second-year Ph.D. student in the English department, and a graduate student assistant here in the CDH. I’m a Philly native with a deep love of white chocolate mochas, crafting, and twentieth-century literature.

I got into DH as an undergrad at Dickinson College, where I worked as a research assistant on Eighteenth Century Poets Connect, a project to reconstruct and visualize the networks of poets, publishers, patrons, and periodicals in 1730s Britain. I loved the idea of using technology to answer literary-minded questions—to see patterns and analyze trends in large data sets that challenge the bounds of traditional scholarly methods. So I was thrilled by the opportunity to learn more about DH and to help shape—even in a small way!—what DH means at Princeton.

Last year, I was an encoder (though I prefer the title TEI Jedi Master) on the Mapping Expatriate Paris project team. This year, I’m helping out the Center with event planning and promotion, administration, and social media. In the Spring, I will co-project manage the Princeton Prosody Archive.

I’ve found the CDH to be a vibrant oasis in the bowels of Firestone, filled with some of the friendliest people you’ll meet on campus, not to mention all the GIFs, tacos, and coffee you could possibly want. I’m looking forward to being a part of all the fun this year, from workshops and Grad Caucus Collaboratories to instashoots with our beloved mascot, Claus the chicken.

Looking forward to seeing faces new and old this year at the CDH!

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I’m Miranda Marraccini, a fifth-year Ph.D. student in the English department, and the CDH Graduate Fellow! I write about Victorian female poets and print culture. When I’m not working on my dissertation, I enjoy reality television, burritos, and spending time with cats.

I’ve long been fascinated with media history and periodicals, from my high school days when I wrote and illustrated my own newspaper. I also worked in special collections libraries part time through college and grad school, so the history of books and print has always been tangible for me. I’ve set type and printed books, and even learned about the challenges of preserving and cataloging rare materials in a summer course at the University of Virginia’s Rare Book School !

My CDH project, The Victoria Press Circle, began last year with network graphs of the people involved in a female-run print shop in the 1860s. At the Victoria Press, women printed anthologies, pamphlets, and feminist periodicals. I’m using graphs to understand the structure of this organization and reconstruct how it functioned as a network.

Through my project, DH helps me find new ways of engaging with the literature I love. It builds far-reaching connections among interests that don’t fit neatly into one field. I look forward to incorporating DH methods into my teaching, so that I can help grow the DH community at Princeton and beyond.