
Contact Information
Fields of Interest
Biography
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.
Research
Selected Research
- Anna Preus. Small Press Excoticism: Rabindranath Tagore and the Late Arts and Crafts Movement. English Literary History. Forthcoming, winter 2025.
- Melanie Walsh and Anna Preus. "Not With a Bang but a Tweet: Democracy, Culture Wars, and the Memeification of T.S. Eliot" In Expressive Networks: Poetry and Platform Cultures, edited by Matthew Kilbane. Amherst College Press: 2025. https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.14525819.
- Melanie Micir and Anna Preus. “Feminist Modernist Collaboration, Then and Now: Digitizing Hope Mirrlees’s Paris.” Modernism/modernity Print Plus 9, no. 4 (July 2025). Special cluster on “Hope Mirrlees’s Paris: A Poem @ 100.” https://doi.org/10.26597/mod.0335.
- Melanie Walsh, Anna Preus, and Elizabeth Gronski. “Does ChatGPT have a Poetic Style.” Computational Humanities Research Conference: CHR 2024. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2410.15299
- Melanie Walsh, Anna Preus, and Maria Antoniak. 2024. "Sonnet or Not, Bot? Poetry Evaluation for Large Models and Datasets." In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024, pages 15568–15603. https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.914/
- Anna Preus. “All out of print”: modernism, minor forms, and Susan Miles’s anachronistic late style. Feminist Modernist Studies, 3 (1), 51–65. https://doi.org/10.1080/24692921.2020.1724482