Anna Preus (she/her)

Assistant Professor
Portrait photo of Anna Preus, a white woman wearing a grey blazer and maroon shirt

Contact Information

PDL B-426
Office Hours
Autumn '25: Tuesday 9:30-10:30 on Zoom (email for link); Thursday, 2:15-3:15 in person

Biography

PhD, English, Washington University in St. Louis, 2021
BA, English, Carleton College, 2011

I study 20th-century literature literature in English and data science in the humanities. I am especially interested in how historical print cultures are being transferred online through large- and small-scale text digitization efforts and in how digital resources can help us tell new kinds of stories about literary history. I am currently working on a book titled Publishing Empire: Colonial Authorship and British Literature, 1900-1940, which offers a pre-history of postcolonial publishing in England that is informed by historical data. With Melanie Micir, I am co-editor of a digital edition of Hope Mirrlees's modernist long poem, Paris, and with Melanie Walsh and Maria Antoniak, I am at work on interrelated projects focused on the capacities of Large Language Models for poetry generation and poetic form evaluation. I am also 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, 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 am a Data Science Fellow with the eScience Institute. 

Winter 2026

Autumn 2025

Winter 2025

Autumn 2023

Spring 2023

Winter 2023

Autumn 2022

Spring 2022

Winter 2022

Autumn 2021

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