Online

This webinar spotlighted Digital Humanities, an increasingly influential field of research, set within a broader conversation about how new interdisciplinary areas emerge, develop, and sustain themselves in today’s academic landscape. 

The event was hosted by Joanna Page, Director of CRASSH, and featured Professor Caroline Bassett, Director of Cambridge Digital Humanities, Dr Ryan Heuser, Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities, alongside three PhD students in Digital Humanities, Emmanuel Iduma, Yvonne Wang and Juan Pablo Angarita Bernal.

Drawing on experience of interdisciplinary work in the humanities, this introduction provided context for understanding how Digital Humanities has grown from an experimental area into an established and innovative research hub. 

A recording will be made available shortly and circulated to all who booked on the event.

Speakers
Professor Joanna Page
Photograph of Professor Joanna Page

Joanna Page is Professor of Latin American Studies at the University of Cambridge and Director of CRASSH, the University’s Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities. CRASSH is one of the largest humanities institutes in the world, and its mission is to promote interdisciplinary and intersectoral research, equipping researchers to lead ambitious projects that make significant contributions to knowledge and bring effective social change. 

Connecting up different spheres of knowledge and practice has been central to Joanna Page’s own research on the relationships between art, culture and science in Latin America. She has published widely on literature, film, graphic fiction and visual arts, particularly from Argentina, Chile, and Brazil. Her most recent book is Decolonial Ecologies: The Reinvention of Natural History in Latin American Art (2023), which explores how contemporary artists engage critically and creatively with the botanical and zoological knowledge expressed in forms as diverse as the medieval bestiary, baroque cabinets of curiosities, atlases created by European travellers to the New World, the floras and herbaria composed by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century naturalists, and the dioramas designed for natural history museums. Joanna is a Fellow of Robinson College and was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2025. 

Professor Caroline Bassett
Professor Caroline Bassett

Professor Caroline Bassett is Professor of Digital Humanities in the Faculty of English, Director of Cambridge Digital Humanities (CDH), and a Fellow of Corpus Christi. She researches, teaches and writes widely around digital media, computational humanities, AI and the transformation of knowledge cultures, technology and social power, science fiction, utopian thinking, critical theories of the digital, and gender, technology and the political. Her publications include the ‘Arc and the Machine’, on narrative and new media, ‘Furious’, a co-authored monograph on feminism, gender and digital worlds. Her latest monograph ‘Anti-Computing’, which explores histories of resistance to computerized cultures, has just been published by Manchester University Press. 

Dr Ryan Heuser
Dr Ryan Heuser

Ryan is a literary historian and computational humanist with fifteen years of experience in researching and teaching in the digital humanities. His research and pedagogy span topics from the history and theory of DH to its methodological groundings in data science and visualization, natural language processing, network theory, machine learning, and large language models. His work focuses on computational approaches to prosody and rhythm, literary and intellectual history, and the history and impact of artificial intelligence on language. Some of his latest work on computational intellectual history appears in a new book from Cambridge University Press, Explorations in the Digital History of Ideas (2023, ed. Peter de Bolla).

Source: Dr Ryan Heuser - CDH