Avery Wiscomb

Avery Wiscomb is an Assistant Professor of English and Digital Humanities in the Department of English at Virginia Tech, part of the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences.

Research Interests:

• Cultural impact of literature and humanities on STEM fields
• History of Artificial Intelligence
• Digital Humanities methodologies
• Computational bibliography
• Science fiction studies
• Literary history of early AI

Research Trends: Wiscomb's scholarship focuses on the intersection of humanities and technology, particularly examining how literary and cultural frameworks have influenced the development of artificial intelligence. Their work combines historical analysis with digital methodologies to explore connections between traditional humanities scholarship and computational approaches, with a current book project offering a humanities-centered history of AI as it emerged in the U.S. mid-century in the scientific work of Nobel-prize and Turing-award winner Herbert A. Simon.

Scientific Awards and Fellowships:

• Member, Committee on Information Technology, Modern Language Association (2021-2024)
• Norberg Grant Recipient at the Charles Babbage Institute (2017)
• A.W. Mellon Fellow in the Digital Humanities, Carnegie Mellon University (2017-2016)
• HASTAC Scholar for Carnegie Mellon University Libraries' digital humanities lab dSHARP (2019-2017)
• Rare Materials Fellow at Carnegie Mellon University Libraries (2018-2017)

Teaching and Mentoring: Wiscomb teaches graduate courses in Digital Humanities and Literary Research Methods, and undergraduate courses spanning science fiction studies, literary criticism, utopian literature, classical reception studies, and the history of humanities computing. They have been involved in collaborative web-based public humanities projects and helped develop new academic programs including the Humanities Analytics minor at Carnegie Mellon University.

Labs and Collaborative Projects: Wiscomb has contributed to dSHARP (Carnegie Mellon University Libraries' digital humanities lab), The Frankenstein Variorum project, MARXdown, and Print and Probability (an NSF-funded book history and computational bibliography project).