About

Matthew Lavin is an Assistant Professor of Humanities Analytics in the Data Analytics Program at Denison University. He earned a PhD in English from the University of Iowa in 2012; a master’s degree in American studies at Utah State University in 2006; and a bachelor’s degree at St. Lawrence University in 2002. His dissertation, “Collaborative Momentum: The Author and the Middle Man in U.S. Literature and Culture, 1890-1940” examines the supportive and productively adversarial labor of editors, publishers, and other literary go-betweens, as well as how this labor contributed to the construction of modern authorship. Lavin’s scholarship focuses on the intersection of book history, U.S. literature, and cultural analytics methods. His articles have appeared in or are forthcoming from Auto|Biography Studies, Cather Studies, Cultural Analytics, Digital Humanities Quarterly, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, The Programming Historian, Studies in the Novel, and Western American Literature.

From 2012 to 2013, Lavin served as a Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s Center for Digital Research in the Humanities (CDRH). From 2013 to 2015, he was Associate Program Coordinator for the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Initiative “Crossing Boundaries: Re-Envisioning the Humanities for the 21st Century” at St. Lawrence University. From 2015 to 2020, he was a Clinical Assistant Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, and Director of the department’s Digital Media Lab.