Mattie Burkert recently joined the Department of English as an Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities.

Mattie Burkert is an Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities in the English Department at UO. Her research investigates the London theater world of the long eighteenth century using a combination of archival and computational approaches. Her essays have appeared in Theatre Journal, Modern Philology, and the edited collection Early Modern Studies after the Digital Turn (Iter, 2016). Her first book, titled Speculative Enterprise: Public Theaters and Financial Markets in London, 1688-1763, is forthcoming from the University of Virginia Press in 2021.

As an Assistant Professor at Utah State University from 2016 to 2020, Burkert led a team that developed the NEH-funded London Stage Database. The project website enables queries into and exploratory statistical analysis of over 52,000 performance events recorded in London between 1659 and 1800. It is also a media archeological project that revives and revitalizes of the London Stage Information Bank, an electronic database of performance records created in the 1970s and previously thought lost. (You can read more about the legacy of the Information Bank in Digital Humanities Quarterly). In keeping with this history, the user interface design foregrounds the data’s numerous transformations, highlighting the invisible labor that went into the Information Bank’s original creation as well as the choices that informed the recovery process. The website launched in July 2019 and has been featured in The Economist and reviewed in ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830. Burkert plans to continue adding data and features to this project at UO and hopes to have the opportunity to mentor undergraduate and graduate researchers interested in working on it with her. She imagines a future in which this database, in combination with GIS locations of the London playhouses and visual search technologies, enables gaming and augmented reality experiences that immerse users in a vibrant and under-studied moment in the history of London’s entertainment industry.

Burkert is deeply invested in helping students leverage digital humanities methods to develop new forms of ethical, socially aware scholarship. In a forthcoming state-of-the-field essay, she traces the relationship between the increased attention to issues of identity, equity, and social justice in DH and a set of related methodological turns—away from rhetorics of scale, objectivity, and novelty, and towards an increased focus on the material specificity and social embeddedness of digital data, tools, devices, and infrastructures. This commitment informs her teaching, as well. At USU, she taught a graduate seminar on “The Deep Eighteenth Century” that was selected as a winner of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Innovative Course Design Competition. In that course, students collaborated to develop a public-facing digital exhibition using the web publishing platform Omeka. Curating materials from USU Special Collections and Archives as well as subscription databases, students created an interactive experience that explored the legacies of this period that continue to haunt the present—from the cultural violence enacted towards indigenous Americans forced to convert to Christianity, to the racist erasure of the Haitian Revolution from popular histories of political Enlightenment. During the 2020-21 academic year, Burkert is teaching undergraduate courses focused on the intersections of race and technology as part of the Digital Humanities minor, and she is grateful to be collaborating with librarians from the DREAM Lab to teach forty people WordPress simultaneously over Zoom (!). She is currently developing a co-taught course on surveillance and labor in the technology industries, as well as a graduate course on media archeology and recovery.

Burkert’s shelfie includes books by other faculty affiliated with the NMCC (Tara Fickle’s The Race Card and Dan Rosenberg’s co-authored Cartographies of Time) and another recent favorite, Elizabeth Losh and Jacqueline Wernimont’s edited collection Bodies of Information: Intersectional Feminism and the Digital Humanities (link is to an open-access e-book). Along similar lines, she also recommends the open-access edition of Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein’s Data Feminism. In her free time, Burkert has been enjoying N. K. Jemisin’s short story collection How Long ‘Til Black Future Month? and the HBO series Lovecraft Country.