Director, Women Writers Project
Associate Director for Textbase Development, CDS
Brown University Box 1841
Providence, RI 02912-1841
phone: 401 863-2135
fax: 401 863-9313
e-mail: Julia_Flanders@brown.edu
curriculum vitae
Julia Flanders has worked at the Women Writers Project since 1992, starting as a proofreader, then in 1993 as Managing Editor for a series of books the WWP was publishing with Oxford University Press, and then until 2000 as Textbase Editor and Project Manager, working primarily on documentation, text acquisition, encoding research, and systems to manage the WWP’s encoding work, and overseeing the project’s general strategy and planning. She is now the Director of the WWP, and is now also an Associate Director of CDS.
Julia finds in text encoding an opportunity to think about the transformation of textual information into data. The implications of this activity—the resulting product, its uses and new cultural meaning—are at the center of her research interests. She is also interested in how disciplinary boundaries and identities are created and understood, and the role that theories of text play in such boundaries. She is currently working on a study of collaboration and the organization of scholarly work in the digital humanities.
Julia received an A.B. in English and American history and literature from Harvard University in 1987, writing her thesis on Robert Frost and pragmatism. After graduating she spent two years in England on a Marshall Scholarship at St. John’s College, Cambridge, and received a B.A. in English literature. She began graduate work at Brown University’s Department of English, receiving an M.A. in 1991 and a Ph.D. in 2005. Her doctoral dissertation is entitled “Digital Humanities and the Politics of Scholarly Work”. It focuses on the history of professional identity in textual studies, and the impact of this history on our understanding of digital textuality.
Julia is actively affiliated with the Modern Language Association, the Association for Computers and the Humanities (currently serving as president), and the Text Encoding Initiative (currently representing Brown University on the TEI board of directors). She also serves on advisory boards of various sorts for a number of digital publications and projects, including the Walt Whitman Archive, NINES, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the Orlando Project.
