Madeleine Casad

Madeleine Casad is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Cinema & Media Arts at Vanderbilt University and serves as the Executive Director of the Vanderbilt Center for Digital Humanities. She is actively engaged in interdisciplinary research and academic leadership at the intersection of digital technology and humanistic inquiry.

Education:

• PhD in Comparative Literature, Cornell University, 2012

Her research focuses on power, identity, and contested public memory across technologies of recording and storytelling, particularly in digital media. Her academic interests include digital humanities, race, gender, and technology, digital archives, cultural memory, and posthumanism. She has pioneered work in critical and computational digital humanities, emphasizing the ethical and political dimensions of digital methods in humanities scholarship.

She has developed and taught innovative courses such as Digital Storytelling, Introduction to Digital Humanities, Media, Memory, Story, and Working with Data, integrating theory and practice. Her leadership at the Vanderbilt Center for Digital Humanities involves fostering experimental research through collaboration with the Office of the Vice Provost for Research Information Technology, the Data Science Institute, and the Vanderbilt University Libraries.

From 2011 to 2016, she served as Associate Curator of the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art at Cornell University, where she led outreach, education, and preservation efforts for a globally significant collection of new media art. Prior to Vanderbilt, she taught courses on cinema, literature, and video games at Cornell University and Ithaca College.

She has extensive experience in academic program development, having directed graduate fellowship programs and created curricula for both undergraduate and graduate students in digital humanities. Her work emphasizes the conflicts and challenges inherent in applying digital methods to humanistic questions.