Mary Naydan

As CDH Project Manager, Mary Naydan is responsible for designing, analyzing, and overseeing project management processes for CDH Research Partnerships and the CDH. Working closely with CDH Research Software Engineers, Mary coordinates development work across the full CDH project portfolio. Mary directs the Project Management Fellowship for graduate students, and she regularly consults with Princeton faculty, students, and staff on conceptualizing, planning, implementing, and closing out their digital humanities projects. She teaches a popular Wintersession course on Project Management 101.

Mary’s research background is in twentieth-century Anglo-American literature, popular genres, and media studies. From 2018-2024, Mary was the Project Manager and co-PI for the Princeton Prosody Archive (PPA). She was instrumental in supporting the development of PPA 3.0, as well as The Ends of Prosody, and has overseen dozens of graduate and undergraduate research assistants on the project. Prior to joining the CDH as a full-time staff member in 2023, Mary also worked at the CDH as a Graduate Student Assistant, a Researcher for the Shakespeare and Company Project, and a Senior Project Management Fellow. In Spring 2025, Mary developed and taught a Freshman Seminar about literary representations of artificial intelligence titled “Speculative Fiction: From Pygmalion to ChatGPT.” She has also assisted with instruction for various Princeton courses, including Children’s Literature, which uses the ABC Books Archive, and the Digital Humanities Computer Science Independent Work Seminar.

Currently, Mary is managing the technical planning and implementation for two CDH Research Partnerships: Citing Marx and MUSE (Multilingual Semantic Embeddings). Over the 2025-26 academic year, she will be co-leading (with Jeri Wieringa) the Humanities Accelerator, a consultation program to support humanities faculty with digital project ideas. She is co-writing a volume with Meredith Martin and Rebecca Sutton Koeser on the Princeton Prosody Archive and the challenges of conducting digital research in the age of the proprietary database. Other research interests include digital pedagogy, project management frameworks for research software engineering, and science fiction & fantasy. Mary is working on turning her media studies dissertation, Forms of Fantasy, into a monograph; the book project draws on several digitized archives to tell a new story about the formation of the popular fantasy genre in interwar pulp magazines, theater, radio, and film.

In 2021, Mary won a McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning Award for exemplary pedagogy. Her co-authored book chapter “Literary and cultural history – exploring the Princeton Prosody Archive,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Corpus Linguistics, is in press. Recent conference presentations are listed below:

• with Jeri Wieringa, "Everything, All at Once, Yesterday: Creating Research Software with Humanities Faculty," presentation at USRSE'25 (Philadelphia), October 6-8, 2025.
• "Teaching Critical AI Literacy through 'Lab'-Based Learning," presentation at Digital Pedagogy Institute (virtual), August 14, 2025.
• with Rebecca Koeser and Meredith Martin, "Beyond the Walled Gardens: Reinventing the Digital Research Landscape with the Princeton Prosody Archive," poster at DH2024 (Washington, D.C.), August 6-9, 2024, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13850968.
• with Jeri Wieringa, "Modeling Project Management through Charters," The RSE Turn in Digital Humanities panel presentation at DARIAH (Lisbon, Portugal), June 19-21, 2024, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14516760.
• with Rebecca Koeser and Meredith Martin, "Working around Walled Gardens: The Princeton Prosody Archive as Workflow," presentation at DARIAH (Lisbon, Portugal), June 19-21, 2024, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12575879.