معرفی
Alison Booth is Professor of English and Brown-Forman Professor at the University of Virginia's College of Arts & Sciences, where she also serves as Academic Director of the Scholars' Lab at UVA Library and Faculty Director of the Digital Humanities Center. Her academic home spans the Department of English and interdisciplinary digital humanities initiatives.
Her educational background includes a B.A. from Bennington College (1976), M.F.A. from Cornell University (1979), and M.A. (1983) and Ph.D. (1986) from Princeton University.
Booth's research centers on Victorian literature, feminist narratology, and digital humanities, with persistent themes of reception history, collective biography (prosopography), and cultural tourism. She has pioneered digital methods for analyzing biographical networks, particularly through her Collective Biographies of Women project. Her work consistently crosses period boundaries (19th-20th centuries), national contexts (transatlantic Anglophone), and media forms (text-image, novel-film).
Her publications reveal evolving interests from feminist literary criticism (Greatness Engendered, 1992) to digital bibliography (How to Make It as a Woman, 2004) and cultural heritage studies (Homes and Haunts, 2016). The article corpus demonstrates increasing integration of digital methodology with traditional literary scholarship, particularly in analyzing biographical networks and spatial narratives.
- Barbara Penny Kanner Award for Bibliomethodology
- ACLS Digital Innovation Fellowship (2014)
- NEH Level II Start-up Grant for Cohorts of Women in Biographical Collections (2015-2016)
- Virginia Center for the Humanities Fellowship (1993)
As Academic Director of the Scholars' Lab, Booth has secured significant grants including NEH and ACLS funding for digital humanities projects. She has mentored numerous digital scholarship initiatives through the Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities program and hosted Feminist DH@UVA conferences. Her service includes directing graduate studies, serving as Associate Dean for Personnel, and leading professional organizations including the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature.
Booth leads the Scholars' Lab at UVA Library, a major digital humanities center supporting computational research across disciplines. Her Collective Biographies of Women project, developed with the Scholars' Lab and Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, represents a sustained collaborative effort involving database development, XML schema design, and digital publication through the NINES consortium.
