Victoria Szabo

Background:
I hold an M.A. and Ph.D. in English from the University of Rochester, where I studied Nineteenth-Century literature and culture, feminist and postcolonial theory, and cultural studies. I also have a Graduate Certificate in Gender and Women’s Studies from the Susan B. Anthony Institute at Rochester.  My dissertation was entitled “Sensational Authorship: Popular Victorian Women Writers and Their Critics” and focused on the evolution of the publishing industry of the 1860s and 70s, and how the categorization of certain novels as high art or popular fiction had as much to do with conditions of gender, production and circulation as with the content of the novels themselves. Though these days my focus is more on digital humanities and new media as new forms of knowledge-production and cultural representation than on Victorian artifacts specifically, I retain a Victorianist’s love (and skepticism) of exhibitions, spectacles, museums, grand classification systems, massive compendia, verbal flourishes, and thick descriptions. I also hold an M.A. in English from Indiana University, Bloomington and a B.A. in English from Williams College (Go Ephs!).

Before coming to Duke I worked at Stanford University, where I managed the Academic Technology Specialists group in the Office of the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, created various digital projects for teaching and research, and worked and taught in the Introduction to the Humanities Program. While I was at Stanford I was a member of the core team who developed iTunes @ Stanford as part of the Apple Digital Campus Initiative (precursor to iTunes U). I was also part of the Stanford Humanities Lab’s “Temporal Topographies: Berlin” project, an early prototype for other digital mapping/archive projects such as the Hypercities project at UCLA, and Duke’s Digital Durham 2.0.