Anna Preus (she/her)

I study 20th-century literature in English and data science in the humanities. I'm especially interested in how historical print cultures are being transferred online and how digital resources can help us tell new kinds of stories about literary history. My current book project, Publishing Empire: Colonial Authorship and British Literature, 1900-1940 (under contract with Princeton UP), offers a revised history of metropolitan modernism, highlighting breakout literary works by authors from South Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and Oceania who built international literary careers in part by working with London presses between the turn of the 20th century and the beginning of the Second World War. I am invested in interdisciplinary research, and I benefit from being part of a number of collaborative projects. I am co-editor of a digital edition of Hope Mirrlees's modernist long poem Paris, I have contributed to multiple studies of large language models and poetry, and I am involved with the collaborative projects Responsible Datasets in Context and the Cultural Analytics Research and Teaching Initiative. My work has appeared or is forthcoming in ELH: English Literary History, EMNLP: Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, the Journal of Cultural Analytics, the Journal of Open Humanities Data, Feminist Modernist Studies, Modernism/modernity Print Plus, and the edited collection Expressive Networks: Poetry and Platform Cultures. My research has been supported by ACLS, the Mellon Foundation, the Mozilla Foundation, and the Simpson Center for the Humanities. At UW I lead the Humanities Data Lab, co-lead the Humanities Data Science Summer Institute, serve as core faculty in the Textual and Digital Studies program, and as a Data Science Fellow with the eScience Institute.