Anouk Lang

Senior Lecturer

Background

I joined the English Department at Edinburgh in September 2014. I have taught at the University of Strathclyde, Queen Mary University of London, the University of Birmingham, the Open University and the University of Cambridge, where I obtained my PhD. I hold a Bachelor of Arts and a Bachelor of Music from the University of Sydney, and a Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice from Queen Mary University of London. I am also a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. You can find more information about me and my projects on my website,aelang.github.io.

Qualifications

PhD (Cantab)

BA (Hons) (Sydney)

BMus (Sydney)

PGCAP (QMUL)

Grad. Cert. in Digital Humanities (Victoria)

LMusA

AMusA

FHEA

 

Responsibilities & affiliations

Affiliate, Edinburgh Futures Institute

Undergraduate teaching

  • Digital Humanities for Literary Studies (UG, course convenor)
  • Global Modernisms (UG & MSc, course convenor)
  • Contemporary Postcolonial Writing (UG & MSc, course convenor)
  • Postcolonial Writing (UG & MSc, co-teacher)
  • Strangers to Ourselves: Post-War & Contemporary Writing (UG & MSc, co-teacher)
  • Critical Practice: Poetry (UG, course convenor and on lecturing team)
  • English Literature 1 (UG, on lecturing team)
  • English Literature 2 (UG, on lecturing team and tutor)

Postgraduate teaching

  • Digital Humanities for Literary Studies (PG, course convenor)
  • Cultures of the Book (PG, co-taught)
  • Research Skills & Methods (PG, co-taught)

I have also published work on teaching in digital contexts. I ran a research project at Queen Mary University of London which used a social network site to develop students’ intercultural awareness, and published the results in a special issue of Arts and Humanities in Higher Education on the topic of Digital Humanities, Digital Futures. I wrote a case study for the UK Higher Education Academy’s English Subject Centre about using online learning journals to help students in English literature get to grips with literary theory. I have also written about using techniques from corpus linguistics to analyse online student discussions, in order to work out how to help students engage with each other in a mediated environment.

Open to PhD supervision enquiries?

Yes

Current PhD students supervised

Alisha Palmer (first supervisor)

Rupeng Chen (first supervisor)

Huiming Lui (second supervisor)

Lena Kraus (second supervisor)

Past PhD students supervised

Katie Hawthorne, 'Contextualising Liveness: Digitally Distributed, Digitally Mediated and Digitally Located Theatre in Edinburgh and Berlin, 2017-2019', 2022, https://era.ed.ac.uk/handle/1842/39529, jointly supervised with Laura Bradley

Suzanne Black, 'From Novel to Network: Digital Intertextuality in Twenty-First-Century Fiction and Fanfiction', 2021, https://era.ed.ac.uk/handle/1842/37850, first supervisor

Bridget Moynihan, 'Digital Découpage: Reading and Prototyping the Material Poetics and Queer Ephemera of the Edwin Morgan Scrapbooks, 1931-1966', 2020, https://era.ed.ac.uk/handle/1842/37005, first supervisor

Robyn Pritzker, 'Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson’s Short Fiction: Gender and Genre in the Late Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination', 2019, https://era.ed.ac.uk/handle/1842/36537, first supervisor

Research summary

My work lies at the intersection of digital humanities and C20th/C21st literature. My doctoral training was in conventional literary studies, but from my postdoctoral work onwards, I've sought out digital tools that can help us to better understand the development and dissemination of literary movements and ideas, and to find ways to incorporate those technologies in critically attentive ways. I am particularly interested in applications of machine learning to large bodies of digitised text, and how humanities scholars can contribute to the theoretical, methodological and ethical work being undertaken in this area in other disciplines.

Affiliated research centres

Project activity

My research looks at the development of literary modernism in the Anglophone world beyond the British Isles and the United States. I have published articles on this topic in Modernism/Modernity, Canadian Literature, Australian Literary Studies and Topia, and have a chapter on the topic of Australian, New Zealand and Canadian modernist fiction in the Oxford History of the Novel in English. I am also interested more broadly in postcolonial writing of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

I am particularly interested in digital humanities approaches to this area, including the use of geospatial technologies to chart the transmission of ideas and the dissemination of material artefacts which enabled modernist styles, genres, forms and concepts to travel around the globe. I have published essays on this topic in the International Journal of Canadian Studies and ELN: English Language Notes. I have built several digital maps, including one of early twentieth-century Paris, which give an indication of the potential of these kinds of mapping technologies and which can be accessed from my website: https://aelang.github.io/maps/.

A second area of research is reading and reception study in the contemporary period, especially in relation to digital culture. I was PI on the AHRC-funded project Developing Methods for Analysing and Evaluating Literary Engagement in Digital Contexts, and in 2012 I published an edited collection on this subject in the University of Massachusetts Press's series Studies in Print Culture and the History of the Book. I have other essays on contemporary reading in the journals Canadian Literature, Narrative, Participations, Language and Literature and The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, as well as several book chapters on the topic.

I have also collaborated with some of my PhD students on digital projects, including a digital edition by Dr Robyn Pritzker (UoE) of four short stories by Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson, Encoding the Vandegrifter (https://robynpritzker.github.io/encodingthevandegrifter), and a digital prototype of selected pages from Edwin Morgan's scrapbooks done by Bridget Moynihan (UoE) and Jonathan Armoza (NYU), Digital Decoupage (http://digitaldecoupage.llc.ed.ac.uk; see https://dev.clariah.nl/files/dh2019/boa/0795.html for more detail).

I welcome enquiries from potential PhD students in the areas of digital humanities, Anglophone modernisms, contemporary reading culture and postcolonial writing.

Past project grants

Carnegie Trust: Working from Scraps: Copyright and Materiality as Creative Constraints for Digitally Remediating the Morgan Scrapbooks (PI, collaborating with Bridget Moynihan [UoE] and Jonathan Armoza [NYU], £7460, 2017-18)
British Academy: Beyond the Black Box: Building Algorithmic & Statistical Literacy through Digital Humanities Tools & Resources (PI, £14 772, 2016-17)
AHRC: Developing methods for analysing and evaluating literary engagement in digital contexts (PI, £21 291, 2014)
Foundation for Canadian Studies in the UK: Outreach Award (PI, £1 475, 2014)
Foundation for Canadian Studies in the UK: Canadian Studies Development Program grant (PI, £5 700, 2012)
Fellowship and bursary to attend the NEH Advanced Institute on Spatial Narratives and Deep Maps, Indiana University and Purdue University, 2012 ($US3 000 plus travel)
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada: Editing Modernism in Canada, project directed by Dr Dean Irvine, Dalhousie University (co-applicant, $CAD2.1 million awarded to Dr Irvine, 2009-16)

View all 28 publications on Research Explorer