Ted Underwood

Ted Underwood is a Professor of English and holds additional appointments in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His research focuses on text mining in large digital libraries, modeling literary concepts with machine learning, and the cultural and historical dimensions of 18th-19th century British literature and science. He earned his Ph.D. in English from Cornell University in 1997. His work bridges literary studies, digital humanities, and cultural analytics, emphasizing computational methods to explore literary history and sociocultural dynamics.

Key research interests include the application of machine learning to analyze cultural change, the sociology of cultural distinction, and the digitization of non-Western texts. Underwood’s publications, such as Distant Horizons: Digital Evidence and Literary Change (2019) and Why Literary Periods Mattered (2013), challenge traditional literary historiography through computational approaches. His recent work examines semantic and prosodic features of poetry, OCR challenges in digital libraries, and ethical implications of large language models in education.

Underwood collaborates across disciplines, contributing to projects like the HathiTrust Digital Library and advocating for open data practices in humanities research. His writing on AI ethics highlights the need for critical engagement with generative models in teaching and scholarship.