معرفی
Bridget Whearty serves as an Associate Professor in the English, General Literature and Rhetoric department at Binghamton University, where she also holds affiliation with the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Her academic work spans multiple disciplinary boundaries, connecting literary studies, medieval scholarship, and digital humanities with critical perspectives on information and archival practices.
Whearty earned her PhD from Stanford University and completed her BA at the University of Montana. Her educational background informs her interdisciplinary approach that bridges traditional literary scholarship with contemporary digital methodologies and critical theory.
Her research interests focus on queer and trans perspectives in medieval literature and material culture, with particular attention to how digital technologies reshape our understanding of medieval manuscripts. She explores how digital humanities projects engage with issues of labor, representation, and erasure in both historical and contemporary contexts. Her work critically examines the intersections between medieval book production, modern digital scholarship, and the politics of archival representation.
Whearty's publications reveal a consistent thread connecting medieval manuscript studies with contemporary digital practices, particularly examining how digital projects handle issues of labor, representation, and accessibility. Her work demonstrates how medieval studies can inform contemporary digital humanities practices while simultaneously using digital methodologies to uncover new perspectives on medieval texts and material culture.
Her notable awards include the 2023 John Grace Memorial Book Historian in Residence at the University of British Columbia, the 2022 Harpur College Faculty Research Grant, and the 2020 New Chaucer Society Early Career Essay Prize. Additional recognition includes the University of Glasgow Library Visiting Research Fellowship and multiple internal Binghamton University research awards.
Whearty has been actively involved in grant-funded research initiatives, particularly through her role as co-Principal Investigator of 'Always Here: a Queer+Trans Global Medieval Sourcebook,' an emerging digital project and open educational resource. Her community engagement includes participation in the Center for Civic Engagement's Community Engaged Teaching Fellows Program.
She is the creator of the influential Caswell Test (#CaswellTest), which challenges humanities scholars to engage more rigorously with the work of archivists and librarians when writing about 'the archive.' This framework has gained recognition for addressing critical gaps in how scholars conceptualize archival labor and representation.
