Welcome the New Director

Mark Algee-Hewitt, Associate Professor of English at Stanford, has been appointed the new faculty director of the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA).

Founded in 2012, CESTA is Stanford’s premier institute for the digital humanities. As a scholarly community, it catalyzes and supports cutting-edge work through its fellowship programs, workshops, and events for researchers from all walks of academic life. 

Now part of the Stanford Humanities Center, CESTA embraces emerging digital methodologies and tools to complement existing traditional research methods of analysis and interpretation. Together, CESTA and the Humanities Center serve as the hub of an international network of fellows, visiting scholars, students, and alumni. 

“I’m so pleased that Mark has agreed to serve as CESTA’s new Director,” says Humanities Center Director Roland Greene. “Among the exciting plans for the future, we have high hopes for launching a new major in Data Science, which Mark will integrate into CESTA’s undergraduate program. It’s a new chapter for both institutions and I look forward to strengthening our relationship over the next few years.”

Mark Algee-Hewitt has been a member of the Stanford faculty since 2014. His work applies computational methods to literary analysis, using quantitative models to explore the representational aesthetics of the writing of the past three centuries. As director of the Stanford Literary Lab, he has led a diverse set of projects including a study of science communication in contemporary Climate Fiction, a Mellon-funded investigation into the relationship between Literary Theory and its use in criticism, and a computational analysis of domestic spaces in nineteenth-century novels. His own work focuses on the aesthetic theory of the long eighteenth century and his book, The Afterlife of Aesthetics is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.

Algee-Hewitt succeeds Stanford Professor of Classics Giovanna Ceserani, who has led CESTA since 2019.

“This is an exciting time for CESTA,” says Algee-Hewitt. “The growing community that we’ve built over the past fifteen years is at the center of many fascinating new initiatives on campus. From the new Data Science degree in Artistic and Cultural Analysis, to emerging faculty projects and public partnerships, from the challenges and opportunities of AI models in the humanities, to the growth of maker culture, CESTA is at the nexus of all of these new ways of thinking about the humanities and the arts. I’m eager to build on the work of our previous directors and to help cement CESTA as the leading center for computational humanities work and education both at Stanford and internationally.”

Algee-Hewitt has been involved in several key research projects at CESTA through his directorship of the Stanford Literary Lab, which he has led since 2015. These include projects on reader/writer relationships in online fan fiction communities, classifying genre mixture in the Gothic novel, representations of otherness in Star Wars, disciplinary style in the novel, the evolution of eighteenth-century concepts, and a computational approach to the affect of suspense in literature. 

Before coming to Stanford, Algee-Hewitt was actively involved in the development of projects that combine literary interpretation with quantitative analysis as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at McGill University working with the Interacting with Print Research group. He has taught a variety of courses in digital humanities, literary history, and theory in both the English and German departments at McGill University, Rutgers University, and New York University where he received his PhD in 2008.

Read an interview with Algee-Hewitt about the digital humanities, published on the Humanities Center’s digital salon Arcade.