Faculty Alumni

Cameron Blevins
Faculty Alum, History
c.blevins@northeastern.edu Cameron Blevins's TwitterCameron Blevins is an Assistant Professor of History, studying the nineteenth-century United States, the American West, and digital history. He is a graduate of Stanford University, where he worked at the Spatial History Project and Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis, after which he was a postdoctoral fellow in Rutgers University’s history department and the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis. His project, Gossamer Network, presents a spatial interpretation of the western United States and the American state by mapping the sprawling infrastructure of the nation’s nineteenth-century postal network. His broad interests include geography, communications, gender history, and information visualization. Read more here.

Lu Wang
Faculty Alum, Computer Sciences
luwang@ccs.neu.edu Lu Wang's TwitterLu Wang is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at University of Michigan. She is a graduate of Cornell University. Her research fields include: natural language processing, computational social science, and machine learning. She is interested in developing natural language processing and machine learning techniques to help people efficiently and effectively understand and absorb knowledge from large-scale text data with inherent noise. She is interested in understanding how people argue with and influence others, as well as form their own opinions on topics of interest. She studies the task of discovering linguistic patterns that reflect these processes, and how to use them for social interaction analysis and prediction. Read more here.

Geoff Boeing
Faculty Alum, Urban Informatics and Planning
g.boeing@northeastern.edu Geoff Boeing's TwitterGeoff Boeing is assistant professor of urban informatics and planning in the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs, and affiliate faculty in the Network Science Institute. He received his Ph.D. in city and regional planning from the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to Northeastern, he was a postdoc in UC Berkeley’s Urban Analytics Lab.
His research revolves around city planning, urban form, and data science. Recent projects have focused on 1) the nature and character of urban street networks around the world and 2) how data availability shapes our understanding of housing affordability. His research has been covered by Forbes, Slate, The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Boston Globe, Fast Company, and various other media outlets.
He has also served as a consultant for various planning, policymaking, and public health organizations including Calthorpe Associates, The Public Good Projects, UrbanSim Inc, Accenture, and Raimi & Associates. Read more here.

Élika Ortega
Faculty Alum, Cultures, Societies, and Global Studies
e.ortegaguzman@northeastern.edu Élika Ortega's TwitterÉlika Ortega is a literary and media scholar and a digital humanist. Her work focuses on the intersection of literature, print-digital culture, and global exchanges in the 21st Century. She writes about digital literature, media, materiality, reading practices, global networks, digital humanities, and multilingualism.
Her projects include “A Handbook of E-Lit Reading”, an archive of instructions to read electronic literature works; “No Legacy || Literatura electrónica” (2016) an exhibition of electronic and print literature in Spanish, Portuguese, and English; and Textual Environments, her monograph investigating print-digital works of literature.
Élika serves on several professional organizations. She is chair of Global Outlook::Digital Humanities, executive council officer of the Association for Computers and the Humanities, and part of the communications team of the Electronic Literature Organization.
Élika keeps close ties with scholars all over the world and often writes for Red de Humanidades Digitales and _laboratorio de literaturas extendidas y otras materialidades_. Read more here.

Benjamin Schmidt
Faculty Alum, History
b.schmidt@neu.edu Benjamin Schmidt's TwitterBenjamin Schmidt is an assistant professor of history at Northeastern University and core faculty at the NuLab for Texts, Maps, and Networks. His research interests are in the digital humanities and the intellectual and cultural history of the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries. His dissertation, “Paying Attention,” described how new ways of measuring attention in early 20th century psychology found unexpected uses in teaching, advertising, and media. His digital humanities research focuses particularly on text mining and the potential of large historical datasets for humanistic research. Recent work in topic modeling, visualization of historic data, and thematic mapping. Read more here.

Sercan Sengun
Faculty Alum, Art & Design
s.sengun@northeastern.edu Sercan Sengun's TwitterDr. Sercan Sengun is a researcher, teacher, and game designer, exploring phenomena at the intersections of video game studies, gamer communities, cultural informatics, virtual identities, and interactive narratives. In the past, he conducted postdoctoral research as a part of MIT CSAIL (Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory), MIT ICE Lab (Imagination, Computation, and Expression Laboratory), and Qatar Computing Research Institute, and taught graduate and undergraduate game design courses at Bahcesehir University and Istanbul Bilgi University. Read more here.
Graduate Alumni

Cara Marta Messina
DITI Assistant Director Alum, 2018-20, English
messina.c@husky.neu.edu Cara Marta Messina's TwitterCara Marta Messina is a third year PhD student in the English Department, focusing on Writing and Rhetoric. She is the recipient of the 2019 Kairos Journal Graduate Student Teaching Award. Her research interests include writing studies, fan studies, digital rhetoric, rhetorical genre studies, and critical digital pedagogy. Her work merges writing analytics, digital humanities, and writing studies methodologies to trace online critical fan composing practices. She is an advocate for making knowledges accessible and incorporates a digital critical pedagogical lens in her work teaching, working with other instructors on professional development, and providing pedagogical resources through the use of online toolkits and documentation.

Laura Johnson
NULab Coordinator Alum, 2019-20, English
johnson.lau@husky.neu.edu Laura Johnson's TwitterLaura Johnson is a second year Ph.D Student in the English Department, focusing on Literature and Digital Humanities. She research interests include narrative and representation in the archive, focusing on questions of gender, sexuality, and community engagement. She incorporates digital humanities methods in her research on finding aids as data, using computational textual analysis to explore systems of classification and categorization in the archival description of LGBTQ collections. She has also served as a Research Assistant for the NEH-funded Women Writers Project's Word Vector for the Thoughtful Institute series.

Garrett Morrow
Graduate Fellow Alum, 2019-2020, Political Science,
Morrow.g@husky.neu.edu Garrett Morrow's TwitterGarrett Morrow is a 3rd year PhD student in Political Science. His research is concerned with natural and man-made disaster resilience policy, networked governance, and the effects of physical place on social capital. He employs a mixed-methods approach combining geographic information systems, network analysis, statistics, and computational text analysis. Outside of research, Garrett is an avid runner and dedicated baseball fan.

Jeff Sternberg
Graduate Fellow Alum, 2019-2020, Sociology,
sternberg.je@husky.neu.edu Jeff Sternberg's TwitterJeff is a 5th year PhD Candidate in the Sociology Department. His research is primarily concerned with charting the shifting geographies of employment opened up by post-industrialization. He focuses on how young people make decisions regarding their future and where to invest their mobility. Jeff’s dissertation research investigates these processes by looking at mobile populations including backpackers, temporary-workers, and digital nomads in the context of urban co-living spaces. He utilizes a mixed-methods approach, using techniques from the computational social sciences, including text analysis and social network analysis, coupled with multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in Los Angeles, CA and Dharamsala, India. His work as a research assistant investigates the potential application of computer vision to social science inquiries.

Hanyu Chwe
Graduate Fellow Alum 2018-19, Network Science
hanyu@chwe.net Hanyu Chwe's TwitterHanyu is a first year PhD student working both in the LAZER Lab and with Professor Donghee Jo. He graduated with a degree in Economics and Political Science from Swarthmore College in 2016. He is interested in texts, maps, social networks and broadly exploring the interdisciplinary nature of network science.

Rachel E. Molko
Graduate Fellow Alum 2018-19, English
molko.r@husky.neu.edu Rachel E. Molko's TwitterRachel wrapped up her M.A. in Writing and Rhetoric at University of Central Florida and is now a first-year Ph.D. candidate with NEU's English Department. Her thesis, "Rewriting Patriarchal Norms in Academia: Invitational Rhetoric in a Crowdsourced Survey," explores how the artifact served as a feminist discursive space by showcasing narratives that counter the status quo in academic workspaces. She plans to continue exploring feminist rhetorical practice throughout her time at Northeastern.

Molly Nebiolo
Graduate Fellow Alum 2018-19, History
nebiolo.m@husky.neu.edu Molly Nebiolo's TwitterMolly Nebiolo is a third year PhD candidate in the History program. She completed her bachelor's degree in both history and biology from Butler University in Indianapolis, Indiana. Coming from a background of over four years' experience working as an IT Technician, Molly enjoys the multitude of interdisciplinary applications that come with working in the digital humanities, with their uses for her own work and as pedagogical frameworks for the classroom.

Alanna M Prince
Graduate Fellow Alum 2018-19, English
prince.a@husky.neu.edu Alanna M Prince's TwitterAlanna Prince is a PhD student in the English Department at Northeastern University. Her work centers around 20th and 21st century Black literature with a focus on gender and sexuality, decolonization, and visual culture. Prince acts the Project Manager of the Early Caribbean Digital Archive where she takes a particular interest in metadata and meta-archival discourses as well as the potentials of remix and re-assemblage of material in the archive as a pedagogical tool. She also is also developing a website for Dr. Moya Bailey's #HashtagActivism research.

Alexis Yohros
Graduate Fellow Alum 2018-19, Criminology & Criminal Justice
yohros.a@husky.neu.edu Alexis Yohros's TwitterAlexis Yohros is a doctoral student in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice and a Harvard Rappaport Public Policy Fellow. She does research on youth violence, juvenile justice, and evidence-based crime prevention.

Kenny Oravetz
Graduate Fellow Alum 2017-18, English
oravetz.k@husky.neu.edu Kenny Oravetz's TwitterKenneth (Kenny) Oravetz is a first year PhD student in the English department. His research focuses on visual narratives, structural experimentation in comics form, and representation of space and place. Kenny is involved in projects through the Women Writer's Project (WWP).

Sarah Payne
Graduate Fellow Alum 2017-18, English
payne.s@husky.neu.edu Sarah Payne's TwitterSarah is a PhD candidate in literature at Northeastern. Her research interests include gender and sexuality studies, modernism, critical race theory, and literature of the US South. Her dissertation, “Women Writing Racelessness: Performativity and Racial Absence in Twentieth Century Women’s Writing,” analyzes both historical and discursive attempts by women to opt out of racial identification. In addition to her NULab fellowship, Sarah also provides support and training for CERES, a Northeastern supported platform for creating digital archives.

Bill Quinn
Graduate Fellow Alum 2017-18, English
quinn.wi@husky.neu.edu Bill Quinn's TwitterBill Quinn is a PhD candidate in the English department, specializing in modernism and twentieth century periodicals. His dissertation examines the changing role of readers as they became more active in the production of print culture by writing letters to the editors of magazines and communicating with advertisers. In addition to working as a fellow in the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks, Bill is also the TAPAS Project Coordinator, a research assistant for the Historical and Multilingual OCR Project, and an encoder for the Women Writers Project.

Lara Rose
Graduate Fellow Alum 2017-18, English
roberts.l@husky.neu.edu Lara Rose's TwitterLara Rose recently traded her home in the Rocky Mountains for a city built by the sea. From here (Boston), she studies historical and literary evidence of mental illness, racism, and oppression, and how those systemic issues affect American ideals of home and family. When she isn't studying for her comprehensive exams, she works on her forthcoming children's book in which a small furry creature, the Little Bump Cat, explores ideas of anxiety, adventure, and belonging.

Lucas da Silva Almeida
Graduate Fellow Alum 2016-17, Network Science
almeida.lu@husky.neu.edu Lucas da Silva Almeida's TwitterLucas da Silva is a PhD student in the Network Science Program. He is also working on his thesis for the Masters program of Complex Systems Modelling at the University of São Paulo. His bachelors is in Political Science from the University of Brasilia. He also has worked for four years as a Policy Advisor at the National Chamber of Deputies in Brazil. Research interests are in the overlap of Complexity and Public Policy, which include modelling the dynamics of parliaments or how systems of government affect economic growth

Benjamin J. Doyle
Graduate Fellow Alum 2016-17, English
doyle.ben@husky.neu.edu Benjamin J. Doyle's TwitterBenjamin J. Doyle is a PhD candidate in English at Northeastern University. His research focuses on the nineteenth-century Atlantic world, human rights, and textual interface. Ben is currently project manager for the TEI Archiving, Publishing, and Access Service (TAPAS) and developer for the Early Caribbean Digital Archive (ecda).

Stefan McCabe
Graduate Fellow Alum 2016-17, Network Science
mccabe.s@husky.neu.edu Stefan McCabe's TwitterStefan joined the Network Science Ph.D. Program in 2016 and has a joint appointment with the Lazer Lab and and the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks. He holds a BA in Government and International Politics and an MA in Computational Social Science from George Mason University. His prior research includes work on agent-based economics and optimizing agent-based models in high-performance computing environments. His research interests include political communication, the intersection of network science and agent-based modeling, and natural language processing.

Elizabeth Polcha
Graduate Fellow Alum 2016-17, English
polcha.e@husky.neu.edu Elizabeth Polcha's TwitterFields: Early American and Caribbean literature; Digital Humanities; Atlantic Studies; Feminist Theory
Liz Polcha is a PhD candidate in the English department, specializing in early American and early Caribbean literature. Her dissertation, "The Sable Curtain: Redaction and the Exchange of Women in Eighteenth-Century Transatlantic Print Culture," theorizes the redaction of interracial sexual encounters in colonial Caribbean writing. In addition to her appointment as fellow in the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks, Liz also serves as the Research and Metadata Lead for the Early Caribbean Digital Archive, and as a Research and Encoding Specialist for the Women Writers Project.

David DeCamp
Graduate Fellow Alum 2015-16, History
decamp.d@husky.neu.edu David DeCamp's TwitterFields: Modern British Empire; Urban Historical Geography; Digital History/Humanities
David DeCamp is a Ph.D. candidate in World History at Northeastern University. His proposed dissertation explores the connections between the visual display of exotic animals in London's popular and visual culture and British Imperialism overseas during the interwar period. He has worked on digital projects such as Around DH in 80 Days, Our Marathon, and Knowledge Organization and Data Modeling in the Digital Humanities for the Women Writer's project.

Jonathan D. Fitzgerald
Graduate Fellow Alum 2015-16, English
fitzgerald.jo@husky.neu.edu Jonathan D. Fitzgerald's TwitterFields: Literary Journalism, 20th Century American Literature, Digital Humanities
Jonathan Fitzgerald (Fitz) is a second year PhD student in the English Department, a research assistant for the Global Viral Texts Project, and managing editor of DHQ. His interests include Literary Journalism, 20th century American literature, and Digital Humanities. His current research focuses on using classification methods to identify genres in digital newspaper archives. Before enrolling at Northeastern, Jonathan worked as a freelance web developer and journalist, with articles and essays appearing in publications such as The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The Daily Beast, and others.
Website: www.jonathandfitzgerald.com

Abby Mullen
Graduate Fellow Alum 2015-16, History
mullen.ab@husky.neu.edu Abby Mullen's TwitterAbby Mullen is a PhD student in world history. Her general fields of interest are the early American republic and Atlantic history. Her special area of focus is the early American navy, particularly in the age of sail. Her projected dissertation topic analyzes the American navy's diplomatic and military roles in the Mediterranean from 1800-1815. She is also interested in how to use the tools of digital humanities in pedagogy, both in and out of the classroom. She blogs at abbymullen.org, and is on Twitter @abbymullen. She works on the Viral Texts project at the NULab.

Gregory Palermo
Graduate Fellow Alum 2015-16, English
palermo.g@husky.neu.edu Gregory Palermo's TwitterGregory Palermo is a PhD student in English at Northeastern University. Having majored in literature and physics while pursuing his bachelor’s degree as an Edgar Fellow at SUNY Geneseo, Greg takes pleasure in applying his computational background to rhetoric and the arts. Greg works as a Graduate Assistant at the Digital Scholarship Group, the Project Manager for the Thoreau Journal Drawings Project, and a Research and Teaching Assistant in Women’s, Gender, And Sexuality Studies. His current research interests include Text Analysis, Data Modeling, Citation Analysis, Writing for the Sciences, and Masculinities.

Sarah Shugars
Graduate Fellow Alum 2015-16, Network Science
shugars.s@husky.neu.edu Sarah Shugars's TwitterSarah Shugars is a Ph.D. student in Network Science. She received her BA in Physics from Clark University, where she graduated Cum Laude in 2004. She received her MA in Integrated Marketing Communications from Emerson College in 2009, and participated in Tisch College's Summer Institute of Civic Studies in 2013. An active member of the Somerville, MA community, Sarah serves as clerk of The Welcome Project board and on the board of the OPENAIR Circus. Sarah is interested in applying network science to questions of civil society and political deliberation.

Matthew Simonson
Graduate Fellow Alum 2015-16, Network Science
simonson.m@husky.neu.edu Matthew Simonson's TwitterMatt joined the Network Science Ph.D. Program in 2015 and has a joint appointment with the Lazer Lab and and the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks. As a member of the political science track, his research interests include modeling civil war, ethnic cleansing, and humanitarian crises with a mixture of data mining and field work. Prior to Northeastern, Matt worked and interned at two peacebuidling organizations, Seeds of Peace and Search for Common Ground, and taught high school math at Milton Academy in Boston, where he was awarded an Innovation Fund grant to develop a course on game theory and social choice called, "Math, Politics, and Society." He received his B.A. at Williams College, where he studied math and international studies and graduated Cum Laude in 2008. His work, “The Isoperimetric Problem on Euclidean, Spherical, and Hyperbolic Surfaces" was published in the Journal of the Korean Mathematical Society (2011).

Michael Foley
Graduate Fellow Alum 2014-15, Network Science
foley.mic@husky.neu.edu Michael Foley's TwitterMichael's broad research interests lie in the overlap between complex systems and the social sciences. In particular, he is interested in how rational local decisions and interactions can produce unintended and emergent system behavior. Michael has a B.S. and M.S. in Mathematics from the University of Vermont, where he did research in computational finance and agent based modeling. Currently, he is working with Chris Riedl to research the effect of different communication networks on a group's ability to solve problems.

Devin Gaffney
Graduate Fellow Alum 2014-15, Network Science
Devin Gaffney's TwitterDevin was previously a lead developer at a startup leveraging social network data in Portland Oregon. He holds a MSc in Social Science of the Internet from Oxford University's Internet Institute, and attended Bennington College for undergrad. His primary interests orbit around the information that people leave behind on the Internet, what that information can provide in explaining human behavior, and by what methods can this data be interrogated.
Website: http://devingaffney.com/

Carolina Mattsson
Graduate Fellow Alum 2014-15, Network Science
mattsson.c@husky.neu.edu Carolina Mattsson's TwitterCarolina is studying how network science and digital traces can be applied to study political science and, more specifically, international development. She comes from a background in both Physics and International Relations. Currently, she is working as a research assistant for Professor David Lazer on various projects.

Kevin Smith
Graduate Fellow Alum 2014-15, English
smith.kevin1@husky.neu.edu Kevin Smith's TwitterKevin Smith is a PhD student in the English Department at Northeastern University. His interests include rhetoric and composition, digital humanities, new media, and digital literacy. His research examines constructions of community in digital archival projects. Most recently, he has served as project manager for the Boston City Archives Collection of Our Marathon. He also works as a research assistant on the Viral Texts project (http://web.northeastern.edu/nulab/infectious-texts/), which examines patterns of reprinting in 19th century periodicals.
Website: http://kevingeraldsmith.com/

Jeffrey Cottrell
Graduate Fellow Alum 2013-14, English
cottrell.j@husky.neu.edu Jeffrey Cottrell's TwitterJeffrey was a Ph.D. candidate at Northeastern University. His dissertation “Remapping the Politics of Space: Antebellum Countergeographies and Print, 1790-1861,” considers how antebellum texts, maps, and other media produced by Native Americans and African Americans imagined alternative spatial configurations to establish political self-determination against the widespread displacements associated with national expansion. His research interests include early American and Native American literatures, critical space theory, and western colonialism. When not writing, he enjoys building up his record collection and hanging out with his cat.

Elizabeth Hopwood
Graduate Fellow Alum 2013-14, English
el.hopwood@neu.edu Elizabeth Hopwood's TwitterElizabeth Hopwood is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Northeastern University studying C19 transatlantic literature and the Digital Humanities. Her dissertation, "Eating the Atlantic: Race, Gender, and Gastronomic Borders in 19th Century U.S. and Caribbean Literature," examines foodways nineteenth century U.S. and Caribbean novels and slave narratives. Most recently she has worked as a research assistant on Our Marathon: The Boston Bombing Digital Archive; the Women Writer's Project; and the Early Caribbean Digital Archive.

James McGrath
Graduate Fellow Alum 2013-14, English
james_mcgrath@brown.edu James McGrath's TwitterJim McGrath was a Ph.D. candidate in English at Northeastern University. His dissertation examines contemporary American poetry, new media, and archival practices. His research interests include new media, digital poetics, digital archives, and Internet culture. He was a project director on Our Marathon: The Boston Bombing Digital Archive, and he ran the Twitter account for The NULab. He's also served as the bibliographic developer for Digital Humanities Quarterly. Recreational projects include floating around Weird Twitter under various pseudonyms and very occasionally blogging here (and even less occasionally here).
Website: http://jimmcgrath.us/

Alicia Peaker
Graduate Fellow Alum 2013-14, English
Alicia Peaker's TwitterAlicia is currently a Postdoc in the Digital Liberal Arts at Middlebury College. She successfully defended my dissertation, which was an eco-feminist project that explores how women writing in Britain in the first half of the twentieth century contributed to ecological discourses through discussions of the natural world and nationalism.
She has also worked as the Project Co-Director for Our Marathon: The Boston Bombing Digital Archive, the Project Manager for The Women Writers Project, and the Development Editor for GradHacker.
Website: https://about.me/aliciapeaker

Kate Templeton
Graduate Fellow Alum 2013-14, English
Kate Templeton's TwitterKate Templeton is a PhD Candidate in English at Northeastern University. Her dissertation examines the intersection of documentary photographic practices with modern American literature amid the Depression-era culture of the 1930¹s. Kate¹s research interests include Marxist aesthetic theory, network analysis, and visual culture. When not elbow deep in archives, she can be found flitting around Twitter and blogging for NULab about the pleasures and challenges of writing and research in the digital age.