Digital Mitford Staff

Project Directors

Principal Investigator and Technical Coordinator

Elisa Beshero-Bondar, Penn State Erie, The Behrend College, Founding Editor↴Elisa Beshero-Bondar organized the Digital Mitford project in the spring of 2013. She maintains the project’s documentation and manages the programming involved in storing, checking, and publishing the project’s editions and prosopography data, as well as its customization of the TEI Guidelines. With Gregory Bondar, she has photographed Mitford’s manuscripts at the Reading Central Library and the John Rylands Library. She is involved in preparing and checking editions of letters and plays, and leads the training of editors and assistants in TEI XML and related coding and programming at the Digital Mitford Coding School. Her work on the Digital Mitford project began with research of Mitford for her book about women Romantic poets, Women, Epic, and Transition in British Romanticism, published by the University of Delaware Press in 2011. Her published articles in ELH, Genre, Philological Quarterly, and The Wordsworth Circle investigate the poetry of Robert Southey, Mary Russell Mitford, and Lord Byron in context with 18th- and 19th-century views of revolution, world empires, natural sciences, and theater productions. An active member of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), she has served since 2016 on the TEI Technical Council, an eleven-member international committee that supervises amendments to the TEI Guidelines.

Managing Editor

Lisa M. Wilson, State University of New York at Potsdam, Founding Editor↴Lisa M. Wilson is Professor in the Department of English and Communication at SUNY Potsdam, where she has taught since 2005. Her areas of interest include transatlantic Romantic and Victorian era literature, particularly women’s writing and popular forms such as the Gothic novel and the literary ballad. She is also interested in book history and bibliographical studies, particularly in the study of authorship in the long nineteenth century (1780-1900). She has published in European Romantic Review, Romanticism on the Net (now RaVon), Romantic Circles, Romantic Textualities, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a monograph on Romantic-period authorship and literary celebrity. Her work on Digital Mitford thus far includes editing and coding Mitford’s Introduction to her collected Dramatic Works (1854), a critical memoir that recounts the author’s influences and experiences at Covent Garden and Drury Lane in the 1820s and 30s. It also includes researching Mitford’s publication history for the site’s working bibliography, particularly tracking the migration of Mitford’s stories from their first publication to their later reappearances in collections and periodicals. A Founding Editor of Digital Mitford, she and her teams of student research assistants have been at work since 2013 on transcribing, coding, and researching Mitford’s letters from 1819 to the early 1820s and on Mitford’s early poems.

Section Editors

Bibliography and Correspondence

Lisa M. Wilson, State University of New York at Potsdam, Founding Editor↴Lisa M. Wilson is Professor in the Department of English and Communication at SUNY Potsdam, where she has taught since 2005. Her areas of interest include transatlantic Romantic and Victorian era literature, particularly women’s writing and popular forms such as the Gothic novel and the literary ballad. She is also interested in book history and bibliographical studies, particularly in the study of authorship in the long nineteenth century (1780-1900). She has published in European Romantic Review, Romanticism on the Net (now RaVon), Romantic Circles, Romantic Textualities, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a monograph on Romantic-period authorship and literary celebrity. Her work on Digital Mitford thus far includes editing and coding Mitford’s Introduction to her collected Dramatic Works (1854), a critical memoir that recounts the author’s influences and experiences at Covent Garden and Drury Lane in the 1820s and 30s. It also includes researching Mitford’s publication history for the site’s working bibliography, particularly tracking the migration of Mitford’s stories from their first publication to their later reappearances in collections and periodicals. A Founding Editor of Digital Mitford, she and her teams of student research assistants have been at work since 2013 on transcribing, coding, and researching Mitford’s letters from 1819 to the early 1820s and on Mitford’s early poems.

Drama

Elizabeth Raisanen, University of Oregon, Founding Editor↴ Elizabeth Raisanen is the Director of Undergraduate Advising and an Instructor of Literature in the Robert D. Clark Honors College at the University of Oregon. A specialist in the women writers of the British Romantic era, Elizabeth’s research interests also extend to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature, Romantic drama, and the Digital Humanities. She has presented papers on Mitford’s plays at the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism, the Wordsworth Summer Conference, and the British Women Writer’s Conference, and her article on Mitford’s play Rienzi appeared in European Romantic Reviewin 2011 . Other essays on Romantic women writers have appeared (or are forthcoming) in Women’s Studies and an edited collection on Mary Wollstonecraft. Elizabeth has also taught undergraduate students how to transcribe, code, and conduct research on a collection of Mitford’s letters stored at Reading Central Library.

Fiction

Samantha Webb, University of Montevallo, Founding Editor↴Samantha Webb is Professor of English, specializing in British Romantic literature, with a particular focus on the intersection of food, agricultural politics, and ecology. She has published in The European Romantic Review, Romanticism, Essays in Romanticism, and elsewhere. At the University of Montevallo, she teaches courses in British Romantic literature, children’s literature, folk and fairy tales, and global literature. She is a Founding Editor and Fiction Section Editor for Digital Mitford.

Manuscript Archaeology

Gregory Bondar, Penn State Erie, The Behrend College, Founding Editor↴Greg Bondar has photographed over 800 of Mitford’s letters in the Reading Central Library, the John Rylands Library in Manchester, and elsewhere. He maintains the Digital Mitford project’s database documenting over 2,700 individual letters and manuscripts. He teaches courses in Anthropology and Archaeology for Penn State University, and has occasionally taught Digital Humanities for the University of Pittsburgh. His research involves archaeological excavations at Tell Timai in Egypt, San Jose de Moro in Peru, and analyzing stone tools with Penn State’s nuclear reactor. While he has only been involved with Digital Humanities applications since 2013, he spent many years marking up ethnographic data in the mid-1990s.

Poetry

Elisa Beshero-Bondar, Penn State Erie, The Behrend College, Founding Editor↴Elisa Beshero-Bondar organized the Digital Mitford project in the spring of 2013. She maintains the project’s documentation and manages the programming involved in storing, checking, and publishing the project’s editions and prosopography data, as well as its customization of the TEI Guidelines. With Gregory Bondar, she has photographed Mitford’s manuscripts at the Reading Central Library and the John Rylands Library. She is involved in preparing and checking editions of letters and plays, and leads the training of editors and assistants in TEI XML and related coding and programming at the Digital Mitford Coding School. Her work on the Digital Mitford project began with research of Mitford for her book about women Romantic poets, Women, Epic, and Transition in British Romanticism, published by the University of Delaware Press in 2011. Her published articles in ELH, Genre, Philological Quarterly, and The Wordsworth Circle investigate the poetry of Robert Southey, Mary Russell Mitford, and Lord Byron in context with 18th- and 19th-century views of revolution, world empires, natural sciences, and theater productions. An active member of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), she has served since 2016 on the TEI Technical Council, an eleven-member international committee that supervises amendments to the TEI Guidelines.

Editors

Amy L. Gates, Missouri Southern State University↴Amy L. Gates is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Philosophy at Missouri Southern State University. Her teaching and research are centered around eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature, with a focus on British Romanticism. For the Digital Mitford project, she works on letters and is the editor of Mitford’s play Inez de Castro. Anne Longmuir, Kansas State University↴ Anne Longmuir is Associate Professor of English at Kansas State University. Anne specializes in Victorian literature and has published more than ten articles and book chapters on Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Wilkie Collins, among others. She also co-edited Victorian Literature: Criticism and Debates (Routledge 2016) with Lee Behlman (Montclair State University). Anne is currently working on a book on the gender politics of John Ruskin's economic theory, which will explore his relationship with several nineteenth-century women writers, including Mary Russell Mitford. Anne is working on Mitford's letters and Our Village for the Digital Mitford Project. Rebecca Jeanne Parker, Loyola University Chicago↴Rebecca Parker completed an M.A. in Digital Humanities at Loyola University in Chicago and a B.A. in English Literature and Social Sciences from the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg, where she has worked as an assistant for the Center for the Digital Text. She is co-editing the digital edition of Mary Russell Mitford’s journal of 1819-1823. Her own digital archive project, The Restoration of Nell Nelson, started in spring 2014 as research for her capstone thesis in History. The Nell Nelson archive intends to restore the importance of a female investigative reporter that exposed the harmful effects of industrialization in Chicago at the turn of the twentieth century. Parker’s interest in Digital Humanities stemmed from her involvement on the Digital Mitford Project working as Dr. Beshero-Bondar’s undergraduate Green Scholar.James Rovira, Bright Futures Educational Consulting, The Anazoa Educational Project↴ James Rovira is founder of the Anazoa Educational Project and Bright Futures Educational Consulting. He has taught British literature, Creative Writing: Poetry, Creative Writing: Creative Non-Fiction, and Literary Theory at Tiffin University in Tiffin, OH. His research interests include William Blake, Søren Kierkegaard, British and Danish history and literature, poetry, and theory. His book, Blake and Kierkegaard: Creation and Anxiety is available in both hardcover and paperback from Bloomsbury/Continuum.

Consulting Editors: Data Visualization Group

Mark Algee-Hewitt, Stanford Literary LabDavid J. Birnbaum, University of PittsburghThomas Lombardi, Washington and Jefferson CollegeMary Erica Zimmer, Editorial Institute, Boston University↴Mary Erica Zimmer comes to Digital Mitford through her interests in scholarly editing, data visualization, textual scholarship, literary influence, and media change. She is a Ph.D. Candidate in Editorial Studies at Boston University’s Editorial Institute and is also associated with several projects through the Folger Shakespeare Library’s Early Modern Digital Agendas group (http://emdigitalagendas.folger.edu/2013/12/03/emda-news/).

Active Consultants and Assistants

Sara Cantwell, State University of New York, Potsdam, Vermont College of Fine Arts, Montpelier↴Sara Cantwell received her M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, with concentrations in poetry and fiction. In fall 2015, she began work on an M.A. in English and Communication from SUNY Potsdam and joined the Digital Mitford project as a Research Assistant. Her M.A. thesis included a book history and analysis of the later poetry of Jorie Graham. In Fall 2017, she joined the Department of English and Communication at SUNY Potsdam as an Adjunct Instructor and continues on Digital Mitford as a Consultant. She continues to work on Site Index development, Mitford’s 1827 sonnets, her self-representation as a creative writer, and her representation and appropriation in contemporary culture.

Advisory Board

Mark Algee-Hewitt, Stanford Literary LabDavid J. Birnbaum, University of PittsburghCarol Bolton, Loughborough UniversityAlison Booth, University of Virginia↴Professor of English, Booth directs the Collective Biographies of Women (CBW) project at the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities and Scholars’ Lab, with supported from the English Department, an ACLS Digital Innovation Fellowship, and an NEH Level II Startup Grant, Office of Digital Humanities. An annotated bibliography, http://womensbios.lib.virginia.edu led to a relational database of the more than 1200 books and 8000 persons represented in the 13,000 biographical chapters in those books. See http://cbw.iath.virginia.edu/public/index.php. With a stand-aside XML schema, Biographical Elements and Structure Schema, the project team analyzes the narrative conventions of women’s biographies in documentary social networks, focusing on sample collections of types of personae. In 2015-2016, CBW collaborates with Social Networks in Archival Contexts to enhance access to archival records of women worldwide. Booth’s research on nineteenth-century transatlantic literary reception history includes a chapter on Mitford and women writers in the completed book, Homes and Haunts: Visting Writers’ Shrines and Countries. Kellie Donovan-Condron, Babson College, Founding Editor↴Kellie Donovan-Condron writes primarily about the intersection of urban literature and the Gothic in the Romantic era. Her research interests are an interdisciplinary mix of literature, history, and material culture. Additional areas of particular interest include women's writing, consumerism and consumption in literature, Southern Gothic, and questions about genre and social networking. In the summer of 2013, she was selected to be a summer scholar in the National Endowment for the Humanities seminar Reassessing Romanticism. She is coding Mitford's epic poem Blanch for the Digital Mitford Archive, and has co-authored with Elisa Beshero-Bondar an article analyzing Mitford's correspondence network across her lifetime. Previously, she worked on a grant to digitize a collection of 17th- and 18th-century maps and ephemeral materials through the Tufts University Perseus Project.Patricia M. Duck, University of PittsburghNicholas Joukovsky, Penn State UniversityDiego Saglia, Università degli Studi di ParmaMartha Nell Smith, University of Maryland↴The founding Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, or MITH, Martha Nell Smith is Professor of English and a Distinguished Scholar-Teacher at the University of Maryland. She has published and contributed extensively to print and digital textual scholarship of Emily Dickinson and her circle, especially Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson. She launched the Dickinson Electronic Archives in 1997 and with Lara Vetter she is developing Emily Dickinson’s Correspondences: A Born-Digital Textual Inquiry.

Past Editors, Advisors, and Active Consultants

These advisors, editors, and students from past years each made substantial contributions to the development of our project: Frederick Burwick, University of California, Los Angeles↴Besides benefiting from his tireless research on 18th- and 19th-century drama and its performance, we are grateful to Frederick Burwick for encouraging the scholarly editing of Mary Russell Mitford, for recognizing the long-range benefit to scholarship of a digital scholarly edition, and for advising on the formation of the Digital Mitford project.Eric Hood, Michigan State University, Founding Editor↴Eric Hood is an Assistant Professor at Michigan State University and holds a PhD from the University of Kansas. He specializes in literary theory, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British poetry (particularly, the epic), and intellectual networks. http://academichood.wordpress.com Melissa Klamer, Michigan State University↴Melissa Klamer earned a Ph.D. in English at Michigan State University, and served as a Research Assistant working with MATRIX: Center for the Digital Humanities and Social Sciences. Her research focuses on Victorian women’s life writing, particularly letters and diaries. Dorothea Lint, University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg, Duquesne University↴Dorothea Lint joined the Digital Mitford project in 2018 as a Green Scholar research assistant at Pitt-Greensburg, and she assisted with analysis of a manuscript performance prompt book and associated new encoding for Mitford’s play, Rienzi. She has developed a digital project on the nineteenth-century serial hack writer William Combe, and began graduate studies in English Literature at Duquesne University in 2019. She is a Spay and Neuter Clinic Volunteer for Best Buddies Clinic, and the author of an independently published book, Dieting Dog: A Guide to Doggie Weight Loss from a Rottweiler Who Succeeded (2019). Rebecca Nesvet, University of Wisconsin, Green Bay, Founding Editor↴Rebecca Nesvet’s other digital humanities projects include the general editorship of a student-produced edition of James Malcolm Rymer’s The String of Pearls, or the Barber of Fleet-street (1850), the first complete documentary edition of this source of the legend of Sweeney Todd; and Science and Art, a Farce, by Malcolm Rymer (1820), edited by James Malcolm Rymer (1842), in Scholarly Editing: The Journal of the Association for Documentary Editing 38 (2017). Nesvet’s research on James Malcolm Rymer, Romanticism, travel literature, and drama appears in the Keats-Shelley Journal, Prism(s): Essays in Romanticism, Notes and Queries, Studies in Travel Writing, Women’s Writing, The Review of English Studies, Literature Compass, Shakespearean International Yearbook, and, in Romania, American, British, and Canadian Studies. She won the International Conference on Romanticism’s 2012 Lore Metzger Award for the best graduate paper. She is a Founding Editor for Digital Mitford.Molly C. O’Donnell, University of Nevada, Las Vegas↴ Molly O’Donnell is the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, President’s Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. She has recently contributed to Victoriographies and the Norton Anthology, and was formerly associate faculty at Notre Dame of Maryland University. Her dissertation uses contemporary sociolinguistics to examine the nineteenth-century tales novel as a useful mode for exploration in the areas of genre, narrative, and gender studies.Cailey McCabe, Kansas State University↴Cailey McCabe has assisted the editing team through completing and checking lettters from 1822. She completed an M.A. in English at Kansas State University and is currently a PhD student at Texas A & M University. She focuses on Victorian Literature and Digital Humanities.Amber M. Peddicord, University of Pittsburgh-Greensburg↴ Amber Peddicord has sorted image files and encoded different editions of Mitford's letter manuscripts and the published versions of those letters. She is assisting the editing team in completing and checking the encoding of Mitford’s correspondence in 1822. She earned a B.A. in English Literature and Communication at the University of Pittsburgh-Greensburg, as well as a Digital Studies Certificate. Brooke Ann Stewart, University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg↴Brooke A. Stewart transcribed, researched, encoded, and proofed the Mitford letters of the year 1823. She worked on the Digital Mitford project as a student at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg, where she pursued a bachelor’s degree in English Literature and a Digital Studies Certificate. Brooke is also on the editing team of another digital archive, Emily Dickinson , which looks closely at Dickinson’s original poem manuscripts and how significantly they differ from their published versions. Brooke is a member of the honor societies Phi Eta Sigma and Sigma Tau Delta, and an active participant in Habitat for Humanity.

Consultants

The following scholars who have each played some small but significant part in the project: John Bawden, Karen Bourrier, Sara Cantwell, Amy Colombo, Catherine S. Cox, Melinda Creech, Alexandra Drayton, Jonathan Michael Horanic, Megan Abigail Hughes, M. Stephanie Murray, Catherine M. Parisian, Elaine Frantz Parsons, Quinton A. Reed, David Robinson, James Rovira, Daniel Schierenbeck, Stacey Triplette, and Don Ulin.

Past student assistants

Thanks to the following students from SUNY Potsdam and UCLA who helped us with this project in the past: Olivia Allard, Gracia Amos, Sylvan Baker, William Barr, Temani Beck, Ella Beckman, Jaime Burwell, Austin Calderwood, Courtney Collins, Shawntel Courtney, May Das, Zakiya Deroche, Lindsay Dingman, Julie Fish, Shekneko Garrett, Sophia Gemelas, Annie Gill, Tracy Harnish, Kyanna Hastings, Toni Hays, Nathaniel Hebert, Chi-Ya Huang, Mehaque Kohli, Corie LaSalle, Brytney Laird, Kemton Lampart, Jessica Langer, Natalie LoRusso, Heather Long, Hailey Lown, Allison McConlogue, Sophia Morelli, Joshua Mostales, Kristen Murphy, Chelsie Murray, Matthew Nardoci, Margo Paine, Ashante Parker, Sara Perry, Martha Peterson, Anaya Phoenix, Jordan Price, Susannah Ritchey, Wilmina Sainbert, Heather Sarsfield, Perdita Sasu, Madelyn Scott, Danya Shembesh, Lindsey Spillar, Rebecca Tang, Aymee Woody, Robin Xiong, and Nate Young.