Meredith Martin

Meredith Martin is 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. 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. Poetry’s Data: Digital Humanities and the History of Prosody (Princeton UP, 2025), her forthcoming book, 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. 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 which she put on hold to write Poetry’s Data. 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. Martin is an original member of the nineteenth-century Historical Poetics Reading Group that has met once per term since 2007 and has co-organized conferences with the eighteenth-century Historical Poetics reading group. She also oversees that website, with Dr. John Schulz, at historicalpoetics.org, where you can find much of the group’s recent scholarship. 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 Fellows and Princeton Graduate students Mi Yu and Anthie Georgiadi are managing editors. In 2023, Martin became the inaugural Faculty Director of the first Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities at Princeton, and, in 2024, began co-editing the Journal of Cultural Analytics with Dr. Tanya Clement and Dr. Amelia Acker, both at the University of Texas, Austin.

Martin is eager to work with 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 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 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 Certificate, 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.

Recent Work:

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.