CHRIS FORSTER

CHRIS FORSTER, associate professor of English at Syracuse University, recently received the prestigious New Directions Fellowship from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. He is the first Syracuse University faculty member to receive this award, which allows faculty members in the humanities and humanistic social sciences to pursue training outside their own areas of special interest. The program seeks to enable humanities scholars to delve deeply into problems that interest them the most. The $149,000 award will allow Forster to broaden his skills as a computer programmer and translate that knowledge to his work with digital humanities. Digital humanities is an emerging field that involves using computational tools for the analysis of humanities disciplines such as history, art, philosophy, and literature. Under the Mellon New Directions Fellowship, Forster will master software and programming languages, which will allow him to better develop arguments about texts from a statistical perspective. By extending his skills as a computer programmer, Forster will be able to enter emerging debates about how large text databases are reshaping the understanding of literature and its history. He will apply this first-hand technical knowledge with his students in the new Digital Humanities Integrated Learning Major (ILM). The ILM, which Forster helped to develop (and which he currently directs), allows students to creatively, critically, and ethically explore the impact of digital technology.