Projects

Generative Humanities

Ongoing research project beginning from the conviction that, just as digital humanities became necessary in order to theorize the rising digitisation practices in the 1980s and ‘90s, a ’generative humanities’ has become necessary to theorize rising generative AI practices in the 2020s. A first research article is forthcoming in October 2025: ‘Generative Formalism: Measuring Formal Stuckness in AI Verse’ (Journal of Cultural Analytics, special issue on Computational Formalism forthcoming Oct 2025). It theorizes a generative formalism, practicing it in a comparative distant reading of historical and generative poetic corpora, which identifies a persistent ‘formal stuckness’ on strict rhyme and meter in AI verse - a kind of formal gravition recombining historical cultural production for its own computational-aesthetic ends. The project is currently transforming into a collaborative grant proposal on ‘slop,’ extending the analysis of formal stuckness from poetry to prose, art, music, and video.

Abstraction: A Literary History

My first book project, Abstraction: A Literary History, traces a slow-moving rise and fall in abstract language across centuries of literary history. Mixing close and distant reading, the book uncovers how these changes in literary semantics mediate changes in social organization. I focus on three literary forms of abstract language: ‘abstract style’, in the syntactic symmetries and semantic formulae of the periodical essay; ‘abstract persons’, in the personified abstractions of the mid-century ode; and ‘abstract realism’, in the “tell, don’t show” narration of the early realist novel. Through this history and framework, the book also aims to recuperate abstraction as both a method and an object of literary study.

Antimetricality

I am working with Arto Anttila and Paul Kiparsky, metrical phonologists at Stanford, to design tools to evaluate the ‘antimetricality’ of a text: the degree to which its stress patterns depart from any known metrical pattern. Such measurements of metrical ‘tension’ or ‘ambiguity’ have a history: prose most distances itself rhythmically from verse at the height of the eighteenth century. We have a pre-print of a paper available here.

Word Vectors in the Eighteenth Century