ach@mla26 post

Author: regan008

pages/news/2025/12/ach-at-mla2026.md

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+---
+title: 'ACH@MLA26'
+date: '2025-12-22'
+author: 'Brandon Walsh'
+layout: 'templates/news.11ty.js'
+---
+
+Please join us for the (virtual) ACH-sponsored session at MLA 2026.
+
+## Logistics
+
+Session 486. Digital Humanities and Contemporary Book Studies
+Saturday, 10 January 1:45 PM-3:00 PM (EST)
+
+## Description
+
+Applying digital methods to the study of contemporary literary production and reception globally, speakers discuss the affordances of using digital humanities to approach a range of topics: the role of literary publishing agents, community formation through bestseller lists, the intersections between social media and the publishing industry, how collective identities are formed through literary distribution, and mechanisms of discovery for postcolonial literature.
+
+## Speakers
+
+* Angelina Eimannsberger (U of Pennsylvania)
+* Laura McGrath (Temple U, Philadelphia)
+* Jacinta Saffold (Emory U)
+* Carmen Thong (Stanford U)
+* Melanie Walsh (U of Washington, Seattle)
+* Presiding: Brandon Walsh (U of Virginia)
+
+## More information
+
+### Angelina Eimannsberger (U of Pennsylvania)
+
+Angelina Eimannsberger is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory, with a certificate in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, at the University of Pennsylvania. Her dissertation is titled *Trivial Pursuits: Women Readers, Materialist Feminism, and the New Life of Bookishness in the Twenty-First Century* and explores possibilities and limitations of feminist reading communities in and around book clubs, social media, and the romance genre with a mixed-methods approach that includes literary criticism, digital humanities and ethnography, and gender studies. Her most recent publication is the co-authored essay "Genre Juggernaut: Measuring ‘Romance’" in *PublicBooks* and she has the peer-reviewed article “The Romance Shop Around the Corner: How Women Readers Created a New Kind of Independent Bookstore” forthcoming with *New Americanist*.
+
+### Laura McGrath (Temple U, Philadelphia)
+
+Laura is an Assistant Professor of English at Temple University and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow. Prior to joining the faculty at Temple, she was the Associate Director of the Literary Lab at Stanford University. Her academic writing has been published in *New Literary History*,  *American Literary History*, *Post45*, *CA: The Journal of Cultural Analytics*, and the *Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction, 1980-2020*. She is Special Features editor of *CA: The Journal of Cultural Analytics*, founding co-editor of the *Post45 Data Collective*, and the “Culture Industries” section editor at *Public Books*. A former Kennedy Fellow with the Smithsonian Institute of American History, her work has been supported by the NEH, the Mellon Foundation, ACLS, and the Big Ten.
+
+Currently, Laura is at work on a book called *Middlemen: Literary Agents and the Making of American Literature* (under contract with Princeton University Press).
+
+### Jacinta R. Saffold (Emory U)
+
+Since 2014, Jacinta R. Saffold has been building the Essence Book Project, a computational database and cultural heritage endeavor based on *Essence Magazine*’s bestsellers’ list, which was published monthly from 1994-2010 and includes nearly 1,000 discreet texts, most of which were written by and about Black people. In recent years the project has expanded to include public humanities interviews with authors from the list--including Alice Walker, Terry McMillan, and Bernice L. McFadden--and a project reading room at Tulane University's Howard-Tilton Library
+
+### Carmen Thong (Stanford U)
+
+Carmen Thong is a PhD candidate in English at Stanford University. She works in postcolonial studies, digital humanities, and sociology of literature. Her work is published with MLQ, Digital Humanities Quarterly, Medical Humanities and World Literature in Motion (Columbia UP: 2020). Her current project uses network models to examine how postcolonial novels are “discovered” within the global literary supply chain.
+
+### Melanie Walsh (U of Washington, Seattle)
+
+Melanie Walsh is an Assistant Professor in the Information School and an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the English Department at the University of Washington. She is currently working on a book called *When Postwar American Fiction Went Viral: Protest, Profit, and Popular Readers in the 21st Century*, which traces how late 20th-century American authors like James Baldwin and David Foster Wallace became cultural touchstones, icons, and memes over the last twenty-five years. She is also the author of an open-source textbook, *Introduction to Cultural Analytics & Python*, which introduces programming to humanities and social science audiences.