Digital Mitford Staff

Project Directors

Principal Investigator and Technical Coordinator

Elisa Beshero-Bondar, University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg, Founding Editor↴Elisa Beshero-Bondar organized the Digital Mitford project in the spring of 2013. She has written and maintains the project’s adapation of the TEI, and she manages the coding and programming involved in storing, publishing, and sharing the project’s editions and prosopography data. With Gregory Bondar, she has worked on photographing Mitford’s manuscripts at the Reading Central Library and the John Rylands Library, and she is involved in editing letters and plays, and in training editors and assistants in TEI XML and related coding and programming for the project at the Digital Mitford Coding School. Dr. Beshero-Bondar researches British Romanticism in poetry and drama from the 1790s - 1830s. Her book about women Romantic poets, Women, Epic, and Transition in British Romanticism, was published by the University of Delaware Press in 2011. Her published articles in ELH, Genre, Philological Quarterly, and The Wordsworth Circle investigate the poetry of Robert Southey, Mary Russell Mitford, and Lord Byron in context with 18th- and 19th-century views of revolution, world empires, natural sciences, and theater productions. An active member of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), she was elected to serve on from 2016 to 2017 on the TEI Technical Council, an eleven-member international committee that supervises amendments to the TEI Guidelines. Dr. Beshero-Bondar is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Center for the Digital Text at Pitt-Greensburg, where she helps coordinate a Digital Studies certificate program for undergraduates.

Managing Editor

Lisa M. Wilson, State University of New York at Potsdam, Founding Editor↴Lisa M. Wilson is Professor in the Department of English and Communication at SUNY Potsdam, where she has taught since 2005. Her areas of interest include transatlantic Romantic and Victorian era literature, particularly women’s writing and popular forms such as the Gothic novel and the literary ballad. She is also interested in book history and bibliographical studies, particularly in the study of authorship in the long nineteenth century (1780-1900). She has published in European Romantic Review, Romanticism on the Net (now RaVon), Romantic Circles, Romantic Textualities, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a monograph on Romantic-period authorship and literary celebrity. Her work on Digital Mitford thus far includes editing and coding Mitford’s Introduction to her collected Dramatic Works (1854), a critical memoir that recounts the author’s influences and experiences at Covent Garden and Drury Lane in the 1820s and 30s. It also includes researching Mitford’s publication history for the site’s working bibliography, particularly tracking the migration of Mitford’s stories from their first publication to their later reappearances in collections and periodicals. A Founding Editor of Digital Mitford, she and her teams of student research assistants have been at work since 2013 on transcribing, coding, and researching Mitford’s letters from 1819 to the early 1820s and on Mitford’s early poems.

Section Editors

Bibliography and Correspondence

Lisa M. Wilson, State University of New York at Potsdam, Founding Editor↴Lisa M. Wilson is Professor in the Department of English and Communication at SUNY Potsdam, where she has taught since 2005. Her areas of interest include transatlantic Romantic and Victorian era literature, particularly women’s writing and popular forms such as the Gothic novel and the literary ballad. She is also interested in book history and bibliographical studies, particularly in the study of authorship in the long nineteenth century (1780-1900). She has published in European Romantic Review, Romanticism on the Net (now RaVon), Romantic Circles, Romantic Textualities, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a monograph on Romantic-period authorship and literary celebrity. Her work on Digital Mitford thus far includes editing and coding Mitford’s Introduction to her collected Dramatic Works (1854), a critical memoir that recounts the author’s influences and experiences at Covent Garden and Drury Lane in the 1820s and 30s. It also includes researching Mitford’s publication history for the site’s working bibliography, particularly tracking the migration of Mitford’s stories from their first publication to their later reappearances in collections and periodicals. A Founding Editor of Digital Mitford, she and her teams of student research assistants have been at work since 2013 on transcribing, coding, and researching Mitford’s letters from 1819 to the early 1820s and on Mitford’s early poems.

Drama

Elizabeth Raisanen, University of Oregon, Founding Editor↴ Elizabeth Raisanen is the Director of Undergraduate Advising and an Instructor of Literature in the Robert D. Clark Honors College at the University of Oregon. A specialist in the women writers of the British Romantic era, Elizabeth’s research interests also extend to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature, Romantic drama, and the Digital Humanities. She has presented papers on Mitford’s plays at the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism, the Wordsworth Summer Conference, and the British Women Writer’s Conference, and her article on Mitford’s play Rienzi appeared in European Romantic Reviewin 2011 . Other essays on Romantic women writers have appeared (or are forthcoming) in Women’s Studies and an edited collection on Mary Wollstonecraft. Elizabeth has also taught undergraduate students how to transcribe, code, and conduct research on a collection of Mitford’s letters stored at Reading Central Library.

Fiction

Samantha Webb, University of Montevallo, Founding Editor↴Samantha Webb is Professor of English, specializing in British Romantic literature, with a particular focus on the intersection of food, agricultural politics, and ecology. She has published in The European Romantic Review, Romanticism, Essays in Romanticism, and elsewhere. At the University of Montevallo, she teaches courses in British Romantic literature, children’s literature, folk and fairy tales, and global literature. She is a Founding Editor and Fiction Section Editor for Digital Mitford.

Manuscript Archaeology

Gregory Bondar, Penn State University, University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg, Founding Editor↴Greg Bondar has photographed over 800 of Mitford’s letters in the Reading Central Library, the John Rylands Library in Manchester, and elsewhere. He maintains the Digital Mitford project’s database documenting over 2700 individual letters and manuscripts. He teaches courses in Anthropology and Archaeology for Penn State Greater Allegheny and the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg campuses, and occasionally teaches Digital Humanities for Pitt. His research involves archaeological excavations at Tell Timai in Egypt, San Jose de Moro in Peru, and analyzing stone tools with Penn State’s nuclear reactor. While he has only been involved with Digital Humanities applications since 2013, he spent many years marking up ethnographic data in the mid-1990s.

Poetry

Kellie Donovan-Condron, Babson College, Founding Editor↴Kellie Donovan-Condron writes primarily about the intersection of urban literature and the Gothic in the Romantic era. Her research interests are an interdisciplinary mix of literature, history, and material culture. Additional areas of particular interest include women's writing, consumerism and consumption in literature, Southern Gothic, and questions about genre and social networking. In the summer of 2013, she was selected to be a summer scholar in the National Endowment for the Humanities seminar Reassessing Romanticism. She is coding Mitford's epic poem Blanch for the Digital Mitford Archive, and has co-authored with Elisa Beshero-Bondar an article analyzing Mitford's correspondence network across her lifetime. Previously, she worked on a grant to digitize a collection of 17th- and 18th-century maps and ephemeral materials through the Tufts University Perseus Project.

Editors:

Amy Colombo, Virginia Commonwealth UniversityKellie Donovan-Condron, Babson College, Founding Editor↴Kellie Donovan-Condron writes primarily about the intersection of urban literature and the Gothic in the Romantic era. Her research interests are an interdisciplinary mix of literature, history, and material culture. Additional areas of particular interest include women's writing, consumerism and consumption in literature, Southern Gothic, and questions about genre and social networking. In the summer of 2013, she was selected to be a summer scholar in the National Endowment for the Humanities seminar Reassessing Romanticism. She is coding Mitford's epic poem Blanch for the Digital Mitford Archive, and has co-authored with Elisa Beshero-Bondar an article analyzing Mitford's correspondence network across her lifetime. Previously, she worked on a grant to digitize a collection of 17th- and 18th-century maps and ephemeral materials through the Tufts University Perseus Project.Amy L. Gates, Missouri Southern State University, ↴Amy L. Gates is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Philosophy at Missouri Southern State University. Her teaching and research are centered around eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature, with a focus on British Romanticism. For the Digital Mitford project, she works on letters and is the editor of Mitford’s play Inez de Castro. Eric Hood, Michigan State University, Founding Editor↴Eric Hood is an Assistant Professor at Michigan State University and holds a PhD from the University of Kansas. He specializes in literary theory, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British poetry (particularly, the epic), and intellectual networks. http://academichood.wordpress.com Melissa Klamer, Michigan State University↴Melissa Klamer is a Ph.D. student in English at Michigan State University, and is currently a Research Assistant working with MATRIX: Center for the Digital Humanities and Social Sciences. Her research focuses on Victorian women’s life writing, particularly letters and diaries. Anne Longmuir, Kansas State University↴ Anne Longmuir is Associate Professor of English at Kansas State University. Anne specializes in Victorian literature and has published more than ten articles and book chapters on Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Wilkie Collins, among others. She also co-edited Victorian Literature: Criticism and Debates (Routledge 2016) with Lee Behlman (Montclair State University). Anne is currently working on a book on the gender politics of John Ruskin's economic theory, which will explore his relationship with several nineteenth-century women writers, including Mary Russell Mitford. Anne is working on Mitford's letters and Our Village for the Digital Mitford Project. Rebecca Nesvet, University of Wisconsin, Green Bay, Founding Editor↴Rebecca Nesvet’s other digital humanities projects include the general editorship of a student-produced edition of James Malcolm Rymer’s The String of Pearls, or the Barber of Fleet-street (1850), the first complete documentary edition of this source of the legend of Sweeney Todd; and Science and Art, a Farce, by Malcolm Rymer (1820), edited by James Malcolm Rymer (1842), in Scholarly Editing: The Journal of the Association for Documentary Editing 38 (2017). Nesvet’s research on James Malcolm Rymer, Romanticism, travel literature, and drama appears in the Keats-Shelley Journal, Prism(s): Essays in Romanticism, Notes and Queries, Studies in Travel Writing, Women’s Writing, The Review of English Studies, Literature Compass, Shakespearean International Yearbook, and, in Romania, American, British, and Canadian Studies. She won the International Conference on Romanticism’s 2012 Lore Metzger Award for the best graduate paper. She is a Founding Editor for Digital Mitford.Molly C. O’Donnell, University of Nevada, Las Vegas↴ Molly O’Donnell is the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, President’s Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. She has recently contributed to Victoriographies and the Norton Anthology, and was formerly associate faculty at Notre Dame of Maryland University. Her dissertation uses contemporary sociolinguistics to examine the nineteenth-century tales novel as a useful mode for exploration in the areas of genre, narrative, and gender studies.Rebecca Jeanne Parker, Loyola University Chicago↴Rebecca Parker is pursuing an M.A. in Digital Humanities at Loyola University in Chicago. She graduated with a B.A. in English Literature and Social Sciences from the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg, where she has worked as an assistant for the Center for the Digital Text. She is currently working on a digital archive of her own. Her project, The Restoration of Nell Nelson, started in spring 2014 as research for her capstone thesis in history. The Nell Nelson archive intends to restore the importance of a female investigative reporter that exposed the harmful effects of industrialization in Chicago at the turn of the twentieth century. Parker’s interest in Digital Humanities stemmed from her involvement on the Digital Mitford Project working as Dr. Beshero-Bondar’s Green Scholar. She is helping to prepare a digital edition of Mary Russell Mitford’s journal of 1819-1823.James Rovira, Tiffin University, ↴ James Rovira teaches British literature, Creative Writing: Poetry, Creative Writing: Creative Non-Fiction, and Literary Theory at Tiffin University in Tiffin, OH. His research interests include William Blake, Søren Kierkegaard, British and Danish history and literature, poetry, and theory. His book, Blake and Kierkegaard: Creation and Anxiety is available in both hardcover and paperback from Bloomsbury/Continuum. He currently lives in the greater Columbus area with his wife Sheridan and his children Penn, Grace, and Zoe.Daniel Schierenbeck, University of Central Missouri↴Daniel Schierenbeck has published essays on Romantic authors including Jane Austen, William Blake, Charles and Mary Lamb, Mary Mitford, Mary Shelley, and Jane West. He is currently at work on project that examines the impact of conservative religous discourse on the cultural politics and aesthetics of early ninteenth-century British literature.Brooke Ann Stewart, University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg↴Brooke A. Stewart transcribed, researched, encoded, and proofed the Mitford letters of the year 1823. She worked on the Digital Mitford project as a student at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg, where she pursued a bachelor’s degree in English Literature and a Digital Studies Certificate. Brooke is also on the editing team of another digital archive, Emily Dickinson , which looks closely at Dickinson’s original poem manuscripts and how significantly they differ from their published versions. Brooke is a member of the honor societies Phi Eta Sigma and Sigma Tau Delta, and an active participant in Habitat for Humanity. Samantha Webb, University of Montevallo, Founding Editor↴Samantha Webb is Professor of English, specializing in British Romantic literature, with a particular focus on the intersection of food, agricultural politics, and ecology. She has published in The European Romantic Review, Romanticism, Essays in Romanticism, and elsewhere. At the University of Montevallo, she teaches courses in British Romantic literature, children’s literature, folk and fairy tales, and global literature. She is a Founding Editor and Fiction Section Editor for Digital Mitford.Mary Erica Zimmer, Editorial Institute, Boston University↴Mary Erica Zimmer comes to Digital Mitford through her interests in scholarly editing, data visualization, textual scholarship, literary influence, and media change. She is a Ph.D. Candidate in Editorial Studies at Boston University’s Editorial Institute and is also associated with several projects through the Folger Shakespeare Library’s Early Modern Digital Agendas group (http://emdigitalagendas.folger.edu/2013/12/03/emda-news/).

Consulting Editors: Data Visualization Group

Mark Algee-Hewitt, Stanford Literary LabDavid J. Birnbaum, University of PittsburghThomas Lombardi, Washington and Jefferson CollegeMary Erica Zimmer, Editorial Institute, Boston University↴Mary Erica Zimmer comes to Digital Mitford through her interests in scholarly editing, data visualization, textual scholarship, literary influence, and media change. She is a Ph.D. Candidate in Editorial Studies at Boston University’s Editorial Institute and is also associated with several projects through the Folger Shakespeare Library’s Early Modern Digital Agendas group (http://emdigitalagendas.folger.edu/2013/12/03/emda-news/).

Student Assistants

Temani Beck, University of Montevallo↴Temani Beck is completing her Master’s degree in Education at the University of Montevallo. She worked on the Digital Mitford Archive while enrolled in Samantha Webb’s Digital Romanticism course in Spring 2017.Amy L. Gates, Missouri Southern State University, ↴Amy L. Gates is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Philosophy at Missouri Southern State University. Her teaching and research are centered around eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature, with a focus on British Romanticism. For the Digital Mitford project, she works on letters and is the editor of Mitford’s play Inez de Castro. Dorothea Lint, University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg, Duquesne University↴Dorothea Lint joined the Digital Mitford project in 2018 as a Green Scholar research assistant at Pitt-Greensburg, and she is assisting with analysis of a manuscript performance prompt book and associated new encoding for Mitford’s play, Rienzi. She has developed a digital project on the nineteenth-century serial hack writer William Combe, and is pursuing an M.A. in English Literature at Duquesne University beginning in 2019. She is a Spay and Neuter Clinic Volunteer for Best Buddies Clinic, and the author of an independently published book, Dieting Dog: A Guide to Doggie Weight Loss from a Rottweiler Who Succeeded (2019). Martha Peterson, State University of New York, Potsdam↴Martha Peterson graduates in 2019 with a B.A. in English: Literature from the State University of New York at Potsdam. She worked as a Digital Mitford Research Assistant in Spring and Summer 2019, focusing on transcribing and encoding letters, as well as updating intern training resources. Her interests include feminist theory; the history of sexuality, and cultural and legal responses to sexual assault. She begins a graduate program in law and public policy at the University of Albany in fall 2019.Stacey Triplette, University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg, ↴Stacey Triplette, Assistant Professor of Spanish and French at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg, earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. She studies the literature of medieval and early modern Spain, France, and England. Her articles have been published in Cervantes and Bulletin of Spanish Studies, and she has forthcoming essays in La corónica and an edited volume titled Connecting Past and Present: Exploring the Influence of the Spanish Golden Age in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries. She is currently working on a book titled Reading Chivalry in Spain, England, and France, which explores the influence of Amadís de Gaula and other medieval chivalric works on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers including Miguel de Cervantes, Beatriz Bernal, Ana Caro, Nicholas de Hebreray, and Mary Wroth.

Advisory Board

Mark Algee-Hewitt, Stanford Literary LabDavid J. Birnbaum, University of PittsburghCarol Bolton, Loughborough UniversityAlison Booth, University of Virginia↴Professor of English, Booth directs the Collective Biographies of Women (CBW) project at the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities and Scholars’ Lab, with supported from the English Department, an ACLS Digital Innovation Fellowship, and an NEH Level II Startup Grant, Office of Digital Humanities. An annotated bibliography, http://womensbios.lib.virginia.edu led to a relational database of the more than 1200 books and 8000 persons represented in the 13,000 biographical chapters in those books. See http://cbw.iath.virginia.edu/public/index.php. With a stand-aside XML schema, Biographical Elements and Structure Schema, the project team analyzes the narrative conventions of women’s biographies in documentary social networks, focusing on sample collections of types of personae. In 2015-2016, CBW collaborates with Social Networks in Archival Contexts to enhance access to archival records of women worldwide. Booth’s research on nineteenth-century transatlantic literary reception history includes a chapter on Mitford and women writers in the completed book, "Homes and Haunts: Visting Writers’ Shrines and Countries."Frederick Burwick, University of California, Los AngelesPatricia M. Duck, University of PittsburghNicholas Joukovsky, Penn State UniversityDiego Saglia, Università degli Studi di ParmaMartha Nell Smith, University of Maryland↴The founding Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, or MITH, Martha Nell Smith is Professor of English and a Distinguished Scholar-Teacher at the University of Maryland. She has published and contributed extensively to print and digital textual scholarship of Emily Dickinson and her circle, especially Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson. She launched the Dickinson Electronic Archives in 1997 and with Lara Vetter she is developing Emily Dickinson’s Correspondences: A Born-Digital Textual Inquiry.

Consultants

Thanks to the following scholars who have each played some small but significant part in the project: John Bawden, Karen Bourrier, Sara Cantwell, Catherine S. Cox, Melinda Creech, Alexandra Drayton, Daniel Hitt, Jonathan Michael Horanic, Megan Abigail Hughes, M. Stephanie Murray, Catherine M. Parisian, Elaine Frantz Parsons, Quinton A. Reed, David Robinson, Stacey Triplette, and Don Ulin.

Past student assistants

Thanks to the following students from SUNY Potsdam and UCLA who helped us with this project in the past: Olivia Allard, Gracia Amos, Sylvan Baker, William Barr, Ella Beckman, Jaime Burwell, Austin Calderwood, Courtney Collins, Shawntel Courtney, Zakiya Deroche, Lindsay Dingman, Julie Fish, Shekneko Garrett, Sophia Gemelas, Annie Gill, Tracy Harnish, Toni Hays, Nathaniel Hebert, Chi-Ya Huang, Mehaque Kohli, Corie LaSalle, Brytney Laird, Jessica Langer, Heather Long, Hailey Lown, Das May, Allison McConlogue, Sophia Morelli, Joshua Mostales, Kristen Murphy, Chelsie Murray, Matthew Nardoci, Margo Paine, Ashante Parker, Sara Perry, Anaya Phoenix, Jordan Price, Susannah Ritchey, Wilmina Sainbert, Perdita Sasu, Madelyn Scott, Lindsey Spillar, Rebecca Tang, Aymee Woody, and Robin Xiong.