Discussion with Meredith Martin & Wouter Haverals

Speakers

Meredith Martin
Professor of English
Princeton University

Meredith Martin is a professor of English and faculty director of the Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton, which started under her leadership in 2014. 

Her book, The Rise and Fall of Meter, Poetry and English National Culture, 1860-1930 (Princeton UP, 2012), was the winner of the MLA Prize for a First Book, the Warren Brooks Prize for Literary Criticism, and co-winner of the Sonya Rudikoff Prize for the Best First Book in Victorian Studies. Her second book Poetry’s Data: Digital Humanities and the History of Prosody (Princeton UP, 2025) was published in April 2025 and argues that poetry can teach us how to think critically about data, and that critical data studies can teach us something about how we read poems. 

With several collaborators, she has been building and directing, since 2007, the Princeton Prosody Archive, which contains writing on poetics, prosody, rhetoric, grammar, speech, and literary history published between 1570-1923. In 2015, Martin received the Andrew W. Mellon New Directions Fellowship for research on her project Before We Were Disciplines: Poetry at the Origin of Language. She is also co-writing Data Work in the Humanities with Zoe LeBlanc, Assistant Professor in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and former CDH Post-Doctoral Fellow, and co-writing Beyond the Walled Gardens with Dr. Mary Naydan and Dr. Rebecca Koeser, both colleagues at the Center for Digital Humanities. She is co-PI, with Associate Research Scholar Wouter Haverals, of the Exercises in Literary Style project, funded with a grant from the Princeton Language and Intelligence Initiative.

Martin spends most of her time working on collective projects with the Center for Digital Humanities and the Historical Poetics Reading Group and is committed to the often-invisible labor of building infrastructures to support the creation of new knowledge — and new ways of communicating that knowledge — both in the humanities and across the humanities-oriented disciplines. She is associated faculty in the Center for Statistics and Machine Learning, the program in Media and Modernity, the Princeton Institute for Computational Science and Engineering, and the Center for Information and Technology Policy. She serves on the executive committees for the Data Driven Social Sciences Initiative, the Princeton Language and Intelligence Center, and the Princeton AI Lab Initiative. She also serves on the Research Software Engineering Steering Committee and the Steering Committee for the Humanities Initiative, and serves, also, on several committees working on interdisciplinary data science initiatives across campus.

Wouter Haverals
Associate Research Scholar & Perkins Fellow
Princeton University

Wouter Haverals is an associate research scholar at the Center for Digital Humanities and a Perkins Fellow at the Humanities Council at Princeton University.

Wouter’s research explores innovative ways to address questions in the field of literary studies through the use of computational methods. In his doctoral research, he applied machine learning techniques to revisit a long-neglected question in traditional literary scholarship: what are the rhythmic characteristics of the atypical Middle Dutch poetic meter? More recently, he worked with handwritten text recognition technology to shed light on a corpus of texts by medieval scribes in the low countries.

Wouter has written on rhythm and prosody in medieval contexts; medieval poetics; computational stylometry; digital scholarly editing; and children’s literature. He also devotes significant efforts to non-Western and historically under-resourced languages, serving on the technical council for the Erasmus+ project DigiPhiLit, which focuses on incorporating digital methodologies in the study of Hispanic-Filipino literature.

Wouter defended his Ph.D. in literature and linguistics in January 2020 at the University of Antwerp, where he also served as a postdoctoral researcher. He has been a visiting scholar at the Meertens Institute in Amsterdam and at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Krakow.