Michael E. Sinatra

Michael E. Sinatra is a Professor of English at the Université de Montréal and currently serves as the guest Chair of the Humanities and Social Sciences at Rennes 2 University. Trained as a Romanticist at the University of Oxford, he specializes in 19th-century British literature and has been a pioneer in digital humanities for over 25 years. His academic journey began with traditional literary studies but evolved with the advent of the digital revolution. He launched Romanticism on the Net, the first peer-reviewed online journal for British romantic literature in 1996, which remains influential. At Université de Montréal since 2001, his work focuses on leveraging digital tools to reinterpret cultural heritage, analyzing literature, film, and historical texts through computational methods.

Collaborations with Rennes 2 University include a 7-year joint initiative on cinema studies and co-developing a dual masters program in Digital Humanities with Clarisse Bardiot. Sinatra emphasizes the transformative potential of digital tools like TEI encoding, enabling large-scale analyses of literary patterns and interdisciplinary research. He also highlights challenges in bridging humanities and data science, advocating for critical awareness of technological biases and environmental impacts. His research explores how digital methods can uncover hidden narratives, such as geographical constraints in Dickens' novels or gendered speech patterns in Shakespeare.

Active in international academic exchange, Sinatra collaborates across disciplines and institutions to advance digital humanities, emphasizing its role in redefining knowledge dissemination in the 21st century.