Meredith Martin

Meredith Martin is Professor of English and Faculty Director of the Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton, which started under her leadership in 2014. Her book, The Rise and Fall of Meter, Poetry and English National Culture, 1860-1930 (Princeton UP, 2012), was the winner of the MLA Prize for a First Book, the Warren Brooks Prize for Literary Criticism, and co-winner of the Sonya Rudikoff Prize for the Best First Book in Victorian Studies. Her second book Poetry’s Data: Digital Humanities and the History of Prosody (Princeton UP, 2025) was published in April 2025 and argues that poetry can teach us how to think critically about data, and that critical data studies can teach us something about how we read poems. With several collaborators, she has been building and directing, since 2007, the Princeton Prosody Archive, which contains writing on poetics, prosody, rhetoric, grammar, speech, and literary history published between 1570-1923. In 2015, Martin received the Andrew W. Mellon New Directions Fellowship for research on her project Before We Were Disciplines: Poetry at the Origin of Language. She is also co-writing Data Work in the Humanities with Zoe LeBlanc, Assistant Professor in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and former CDH Post-Doctoral Fellow, and co-writing Beyond the Walled Gardens with Dr. Mary Naydan and Dr. Rebecca Koeser, both colleagues at the Center for Digital Humanities. She is co-PI, with Associate Research Scholar Wouter Haverals, of the Exercises in Literary Style project, funded with a grant from the Princeton Language and Intelligence Initiative.

She will convene the Modeling Culture seminar during AY25-26 at the CDH, which brings together leading scholars in cultural analytics to develop a comprehensive and accessible curriculum for advanced humanities researchers. She convenes the Special Interest Group on AI for the Association of Computers in the Humanities and is a member of the MLA AI and Research Working Group.

Martin has recently taken over as chair of the Victorian Data Caucus for the North American Victorian Studies Association, and, with Megan Ward, is co-editor of the Nineteenth-Century Data Collective. University Administrative Fellow and Princeton Graduate student Alex Diaz-Hui is the current managing editor. In 2024, Martin began co-editing the Journal of Cultural Analytics with Dr. Tanya Clement (UT Austin) and Dr. Amelia Acker (Rutgers University).

In her committee work across campus and at the Center for Digital Humanities, Martin has been spearheading initiatives to include humanities in the interdisciplinary data science curriculum. The Data and Culture Initiative, which includes the co-taught course “Data and Culture” with Professor Matt Jones, resulted in the creation of the “CDH” subject code for undergraduate courses and the establishment of a graduate certificate in Digital Humanities.

Martin advises graduate students who are thinking about poetry, Digital Humanities, critical data studies, critical archival studies, computational literary study, the history of poetic forms, comparative and Anglophone poetry, disciplinary, history and the history of education, and literary study in relation to other disciplines. In 2021 she was the recipient of the Princeton University Graduate Mentoring Award by the McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning and is devoted to mentoring graduate students with both rigor and compassion. In 2023 she received the Clio Award from the Princeton Graduate School for significant contributions to Princeton Graduate student’s professional development. She advises several University Administrative Fellows each year.

Martin spends most of her time working on collective projects with the Center for Digital Humanities and the Historical Poetics Reading Group and is committed to the often-invisible labor of building infrastructures to support the creation of new knowledge — and new ways of communicating that knowledge — both in the humanities and across the humanities-oriented disciplines. She is Associated Faculty in the Center for Statistics and Machine Learning, the Program in Media and Modernity, the Princeton Institute for Computational Science and Engineering, and the Center for Information and Technology Policy. She serves on the Executive Committees for the Data Driven Social Sciences Initiative, the Princeton Language and Intelligence Center, and the Princeton AI Lab Initiative. She also serves on the Research Software Engineering Steering Committee and the Steering Committee for the Humanities Initiative, and serves, also, on several committees working on Interdisciplinary Data Science initiatives across campus.

Martin is happy to serve as an advisor, reader, or co-advisor for projects that help undergraduate students complete the requirements for the Minors in Computer Science, Statistics in Machine Learning, Journalism, Technology and Society, as well as the varieties of Minors also listed on the English Department website. She teaches undergraduate courses in 19th-century poetry, 20th-century poetry, Literature and War, Poetry and Public Culture, Introduction to Poetry, Children’s Literature, and Data and Culture.

For all general questions about DH at Princeton, please see cdh.princeton.edu. If you have an idea for a project or would like to request a consultation, please start at the Center for Digital Humanities Consultations page.

Selected Publications

Recent Work

2025: Computational Hermeneutics: Evaluating Generative AI as a Cultural Technology. Cody Kommers et al.

2025: Provocations from the Humanities for Generative AI Research. With Lauren Klein, André Brock, Maria Antoniak, Melanie Walsh, Jessica Marie Johnson, Lauren Tilton, and David Mimno.

2025: Poetry’s Data: Digital Humanities and the History of Prosody, Princeton University Press.

2025: “Grief.” Paideuma : Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics Volume 50 / 2023 [2025].

2024: Martin M. “Command Lines for the Humanities.” PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America. 2024; 139(3): 541-547. doi:10.1632/S0030812924000555

2024: “Graduate Students and Project Management: A DH Perspective” with Rebecca Munson and Natalia Ermolaev in Digital Futures of Graduate Study in the Humanities, edited by Anouk Lang, Gabriel Hankins, and Simon Appleford. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

2023: “The Writing of Sound” in The Sound of Writing edited by Christopher Cannon (Johns Hopkins) and Steven Justice (Berkeley). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 127-150.

2022: “AI off the Rails: A Response to ‘AI and the Everything in the Whole Wide World Benchmark,’” Critical AI@Rutgers (blog), April 15, 2022.

2021: “The Poetry of the Past.” Avidly, a channel of the Los Angeles Review of Books.

2021   “The Poetry of the Future” January 29. Avidly, a channel of the Los Angeles Review of Books.

2021: “Prosody and Metre: Twentieth Century” with Ben Glaser, Yale University. Oxford Bibliographies in British and Irish Literature.

2020: “Prosody,” in Oxford Encyclopedia of Literary Theory (part of the Oxford Research Encyclopedia), April 30, 2020.