Professor Ted Underwood will give a lecture at Leiden University in the Netherlands as the Visiting Scaliger Professor for 2019. The position is affiliated with both the Scaliger Institute of Leiden University Libraries and the Faculty of Humanities. In his talk on November 21, "The Role of the Humanities in an Information Age," Underwood will discuss how "humanists are joining hands with data science to create a form of public reflection that fuses the scale of machine learning with the historical self-consciousness of humanistic tradition."
"Leiden University has played a leading role in digital humanities for several decades, and in the humanities for much longer," Underwood said. "I expect to learn a lot from colleagues and students there, and I'm particularly honored to follow people like Anthony Grafton and François Déroche as a Visiting Scaliger Professor."
Underwood is a professor in the iSchool and also holds an appointment with the Department of English in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. He has authored three books about literary history, including Distant Horizons (The University of Chicago Press Books, 2019), Why Literary Periods Mattered: Historical Contrast and the Prestige of English Studies (Stanford University Press, 2013), and The Work of the Sun: Literature, Science and Political Economy 1760-1860 (New York: Palgrave, 2005). His articles have appeared in PMLA, Representations, MLQ, and Cultural Analytics. Underwood earned his PhD in English from Cornell University.