People

Kurt Fendt

Kurt Fendt is a scholar of literary and cultural studies with extensive expertise in the application of information technologies to humanities research and education. He is Principal Research Associate and Director of MIT’s HyperStudio for Digital Humanities. Since establishing MIT’s HyperStudio in 1998, he and his team have developed more than 30 digital projects for a range of humanities disciplines and created two digital platforms specifically geared towards humanities education and research. Dr. Fendt is co-Director of “Berliner sehen”, a collaborative hypermedia learning environment for German Studies and co-author of the French interactive narrative A la rencontre de Philippe. Before coming to MIT in 1993, Fendt was Assistant Professor in the Department of Applied Linguistics at the University of Bern in Switzerland, where he established the Media Learning Center for the Humanities.

James Paradis

James Paradis is Head of Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies and Director of Comparative Media Studies at MIT. Professor Paradis is a noted scholar of literary and cultural perspectives on scientific rhetoric in the 19th century. His main fields of interest are Victorian cultural studies communications. Professor Paradis has also made significant contributions to the field of technical writing and communications. Together with Muriel Zimmerman he co-authored The MIT Guide to Science and Engineering Communication (1997) in order to strengthen the communication skills of MIT undergraduates.

Wyn Kelley

Wyn Kelley, a member of the MIT Literature Faculty since 1985, has taught courses on American literature, literary genres (comedy, melodrama), women writers, and writing about literature, among others. She is author of Herman Melville: An Introduction (2008) and Melville’s City: Literary and Urban Form in Nineteenth-Century New York (1996). Associate Editor of the Melville Society journal Leviathan, she has published in a number of journals and collections, including Melville and Hawthorne: Writing Relationship, Ungraspable Phantom: Essays on Moby Dick, Melville and Women, “Whole Oceans Away”: Melville in the Pacific, and the Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville. Kelley has extensive experience using Metamedia (the proposed project’s precursor) in her writing and literature classes.

Jamie Folsom

Jamie Folsom is a web applications developer and instructional designer with skill in envisioning, creating, and deploying useful and usable technology tools. He has extensive experience teaching with and about technology, managing technology projects, and building web sites. He holds a AB in French from Vassar College and an Ed.M. in Technology in Education from Harvard University, and he has been a foreign language teacher, a technology trainer and manager, and a web applications developer for 20 years. His work includes a diversity of projects in education, the arts, politics and advocacy, for clients in a wide range of fields. He served for two years as a US Peace Corps volunteer in Guinea, West Africa, where he learned an immense amount about appropriate and improvisational uses of technology and about the importance of access to, and participation in education, politics, the media and community.

Suzanne Lane

Suzanne Lane is Senior Lecturer in Rhetoric and Communcation, and Director of the Writing Across the Curriculum program. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering from MIT, a master’s in Creative Writing from the University of Colorado, and a doctorate in English from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her research interests focus on contemporary rhetoric, genre theory, and argumentation studies, and she is particularly interested in sites of cultural contact between discourse communities and rhetorical cultures. In one research project, she has studied the rhetoric of slavery, especially the cultural forms of argumentation slaves developed; in another project, working with the Harvard Study of Undergraduate Writing, she has explored how students learn disciplinary-specific genres and forms of argumentation, and transfer them to new locations. She has also published fiction and poetry.

Andreas Karatsolis

Andreas Karatsolis joined MIT in the Fall of 2013 as the Associate Director of Writing across the Curriculum, after spending five years in Qatar with Carnegie Mellon University. His disciplinary training includes a Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Communication with an emphasis on technical/professional communication in science-related fields, which is at the core of his teaching and research efforts. In his new role at MIT and as a member of the Administrative Committee of the IEEE Professional Communication Society, he is primarily interested in designing curricula and tools which can help engineers and scientists develop life-long competencies in communication. In the past seven years he has also been the Lead of co-Principal Investigator in projects related to the design, implementation and assessment of learning technologies, especially in the domains of language learning, health communication and public discourse. As a native of Greece (and a reader of Ancient Greek texts), he also enjoys conversations on Classical Rhetoric and its relationship to contemporary scientific communication.

Gabriella Horvath, Administrator

Gabriella Horvath began working as the Administrator at HyperStudio in 2009. Her background includes front-of-house administration for a live theater and founding an independent cinema in Washington. Gabriella received an M.S. in Arts Administration from Boston University (’06). She has done research for the Independent Scholar program of Americans for the Arts, and has given lectures at Boston University on the role of the arts in urban revitalization. She is also the Office Manager of the Electronic Literature Organization and co-curator of the European Short Film Festival at MIT.

Rachel N. Schnepper, Communications Officer

As Annotation Studio’s communications officer, Rachel brings over ten years of higher education experience with her to HyperStudio. Prior to working at HyperStudio, Rachel taught at Rutgers University, Princeton University, DePaul University, and Washington and Lee University. Accordingly, Rachel is intimately familiar with the needs of faculty and is committed to helping them integrate digital humanities tools into their research and teaching.

Rachel earned her PhD in early modern European history in 2010 from Rutgers University. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the North American Conference on British Studies have supported her research, which focuses on media transformations in the seventeenth century English Atlantic.

Liam Andrew, Research Assistant

Liam Andrew graduated from Yale University in 2008, where he studied the advent of sound recording and its influence on modern language, literature and music. After stints as a book indexer, French-to-English translator, archivist, and English teacher abroad, he dove into programming and emerged as a software engineer for Delve, a newsreader and aggregator that helps organizations find and share important reads. As a graduate student in MIT’s Comparative Media Studies program, his research interests lie at the intersection of sound and text on one hand, and classification and recommendation systems on the other. He is also a sound designer for theater and multi-instrumentalist in Dinowalrus.

Desi Gonzalez, Research Assistant

Desi Gonzalez graduated from Emory University in 2010, concentrating on contemporary art and linguistics. After her undergraduate studies she spent two years at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where she managed and wrote art historical content for the Whitney Kids website. Her tenure at the Whitney ignited an interest in studying the relationship between new technologies and the art learning experience, both onsite and online. She recently completed a yearlong fellowship at the Museum of Modern Art developing exhibition texts, audio tours, games, interactive learning spaces, and online curricula. Born in Puerto Rico and raised in Maryland, Desi also writes art criticism for various publications and occasionally on her blog.