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.

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

Currently, Mary is co-writing a volume with Meredith Martin and Rebecca Sutton Koeser on 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. In her spare time, Mary is working on turning her 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.