Rebecca Munson

Rebecca Munson is the Assistant Director for Interdisciplinary Education at the CDH. Building on her past work with Princeton graduate students and expertise in project management, Rebecca oversees CDH initiatives, particularly those related to graduate education. She identifies key opportunities for Princeton graduate students to integrate digital humanities methods into their work and to develop core competencies in working with humanities objects as data. In addition, she coordinates the implementation of CDH internal projects and research partnerships with faculty, overseeing and troubleshooting workflows as well as mentoring graduate student project managers.

Rebecca’s background is as a literary scholar, working primarily on Shakespeare and other early modern dramatists. She holds an undergraduate degree from Columbia, a Master’s from Oxford, and a Ph.D. from Berkeley. Before coming to Princeton, she held postdoctoral fellowships at UCLA, where she was a Fellow in the History of Material Texts, and Emory, where she was a member of the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry. She is the founder and director of Common Readers, a digital initiative dedicated to gathering and analyzing annotations in early modern play texts through a custom-designed relational database.

She is hoping to join her work in DH and Shakespeare studies in a related monograph, Breaking Shakespeare: Modularity in Material and Interpretive Practices, which argues that from their inception Shakespeare’s plays have always been experienced, and made sense of, in parts. It explores the implications of modular reading for literary theory, demonstrating how DH methods support and further the aims of established literary critical approaches. Her dissertation, Shakespeare in Common, 1603-1660, also centered on reception history, arguing that Shakespeare’s immediate and enduring popularity derived from the productively ambiguous politics of his plays.

Rebecca’s research interests are concerned with the intersections of early modern drama, book history, and digital methodologies. Most recently, she has published on “Mongrel Forms: Print-Manuscript Hybridity and Digital Methods in Annotated Plays” in the collection Early British Drama in Manuscript, edited by Tamara Atkin and Laura Estill (Brepols, 2019), and delivered papers on “The Stuff of Thought: Annotated Plays, Data Modeling, and Cognition,” “Thinking Through Objects: Tiny Ontologies and Database Design,” and “Marking by the Numbers: Early Modern Women’s Annotations as Data.” She will be a contributor to the Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Interface (edited by Paul Budra and Clifford Werier). 

She also researches and writes on theories of project management and higher education. Along with Natasha Ermolaev, she has taught several project management workshops and released public documentation. Publication of a chapter on “Graduate Students and Project Management: A Humanities Perspective” (with Natalia Ermolaev and Meredith Martin) is forthcoming in The Digital Futures of Graduate Study in the Humanities (eds. Simon Appleford, Gabriel Hankins, Anouk Lang). 

She is available to act as a reader on dissertations or senior theses with DH components and teaches DH-related courses when she can, most recently “Literature, Data and Interpretation” (English/IHUM) with Meredith Martin.