Anna Mukamal

Anna Mukamal is an Assistant Professor of Digital Culture and Design in the Department of English at Coastal Carolina University. Her interdisciplinary work bridges literary studies, digital humanities, and mental health discourse, focusing on how literature and digital media can function as therapeutic spaces. She teaches courses in digital culture, feminist digital humanities, and critical making, with a commitment to inclusive pedagogy and social justice.

Dr. Mukamal's educational background includes:

• Ph.D. in English and Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities, Stanford University, 2022
• B.A. in English and Spanish, Duke University, 2017

Her research centers on the intersection of literature, digital culture, and mental health, with particular attention to how therapeutic discourse appears in 20th and 21st century American literature. Dr. Mukamal examines how women and marginalized individuals use writing in therapeutic contexts to navigate issues of gender, sexuality, and race. She also investigates how reading literature can create therapeutic experiences for readers, helping them recognize and work through their own psychological complexities. Her work integrates feminist perspectives with computational text analysis to explore interpretive communities around feminist literature.

Dr. Mukamal's publications reveal a consistent focus on therapeutic discourse in literature, feminist publishing practices, and computational approaches to literary analysis. Her work spans traditional literary criticism and digital humanities methodologies, often combining close and distant reading techniques to examine how literature functions as a space for psychological exploration and social critique. Recent publications address feminist editorial labor, therapeutic identification in reading, and computational analysis of short story form.

Dr. Mukamal has received several prestigious awards:

• Alden Dissertation Prize for her Stanford PhD dissertation, "The Therapeutic Encounter" (2023)
• Apple Award for Professor of the Year in the Department of English at Coastal (2023)
• Inclusive Pedagogy Award for pre-tenure faculty (2023)
• Professional Enhancement Grant (2024-25)
• Sustainability Grant for "Book Arts and Embodied Experience" project (2024-25)

Dr. Mukamal actively mentors students in the Digital Culture and Design program, guiding interdisciplinary projects that combine digital making with social justice concerns. Her current grant-funded project "Book Arts and Embodied Experience: Building Community and Empowering Social Change through Bookmaking" involves collaboration with Academic Engagement & Outreach Librarian Loren Mixon and Associate Professor of Art Meghan O'Connor. This project exemplifies her commitment to community engagement through interdisciplinary approaches to mental health and social change.

While not explicitly mentioned as leading a formal lab, Dr. Mukamal collaborates extensively with the Stanford Literary Lab and has worked as Project Manager for the Modernist Archives Publishing Project. Her current work integrates digital humanities methodologies with mental health discourse, creating spaces for students to explore therapeutic dimensions of digital creation and literary engagement.