
Mark Algee Hewitt
Associate Professor of English
Bio
Mark Algee-Hewitt’s research combines literary criticism with digital and quantitative analyses of literature and other textual corpora. Although his work primarily focuses on the development and transmission of aesthetic and philosophic concepts during the long eighteenth-century in both Britain and Germany, his research interests also include other literary forms, such as poetry and the Gothic novel, and broadly reach from the eighteenth-century to contemporary literary practice. As director of the Stanford Literary Lab, he has led projects on a variety of topics, including the use of extra-disciplinary discourse in novels, the narratological theory of the short story, and science-fiction world building. In addition to these literary projects, he has also worked in collaboration with the OECD's Working Group on Bribery to explore the effectiveness of public writing as an enforcement strategy, with the Smithsonian Museum of American History on the history of American celebrity in newspapers, and with faculty in the school of law at Columbia University on court decisions regarding environmental policy.
Academic Appointments
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Associate Professor, English
Administrative Appointments
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Director of Graduate Studies, Program in Modern Thought and Literature (2023 - 2024)
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Director of Graduate Studies, Department of English, Stanford University (2019 - 2023)
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Interdisciplinary English Concentration Faculty Advisor, Department of English (2017 - 2019)
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Director of the Stanford Literary Lab, Department of English, Stanford University (2015 - Present)
Honors & Awards
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International Research Exploration Seed Grant, Stanford University Vice Provost and Dean of Research (2023-2024)
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Public Knowledge Grant, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (2023-2024)
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Arnold L. Graves and Lois S. Graves Award in the Humanities, American Council of Learned Societies and Pomona College (2020)
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Dean of Humanities and Sciences Award for Outstanding Teaching as a Junior Professor, Stanford University (2018)
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Annenberg Faculty Fellowship for Outstanding Research, Stanford University School of Humanities and Sciences (2015-2017)
Boards, Advisory Committees, Professional Organizations
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Faculty Advisory Board, Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis, Stanford University (2019 - Present)
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Committee Member, Committee on Academic Computing and Information Systems, Stanford University (2019 - 2020)
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Chair's Advisory Committee, Department of English, Stanford University (2018 - Present)
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Chair, Zampolli Prize Committee, Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO) (2016 - Present)
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Editorial Board Member, Journal of Cultural Analytics (2016 - Present)
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Executive Board Member, 18th Connect (2015 - 2018)
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International Executive Board Member, CenterNET (2013 - 2015)
Program Affiliations
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Modern Thought and Literature
Professional Education
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BA, Mount Allison University, English (Honors) / Computer Science (2000)
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MA, Western University, English Literature / Theory and Criticism (2002)
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PhD, New York University, English and American Literature (2008)
2024-25 Courses
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Independent Studies (9)
- Curricular Practical Training
ENGLISH 194C (Aut, Win, Spr) - Directed Reading in Environment and Resources
ENVRES 398 (Aut, Win, Spr, Sum) - Directed Research in Environment and Resources
ENVRES 399 (Aut, Win, Spr, Sum) - Independent Study
SYMSYS 196 (Aut, Win, Spr, Sum) - Individual Work
ENGLISH 198 (Aut, Win, Spr, Sum) - Master's Degree Project
SYMSYS 290 (Aut, Win, Spr, Sum) - Research Course
ENGLISH 398 (Aut, Win, Spr, Sum) - Revision and Development of a Paper
ENGLISH 398R (Aut, Win, Spr, Sum) - Senior Honors Tutorial
SYMSYS 190 (Aut, Win, Spr, Sum)
- Curricular Practical Training
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Prior Year Courses
2023-24 Courses
- Computationally Mapping the Literary Imagination
ENGLISH 385 (Aut) - Introduction to Interdisciplinary Studies
MTL 334C (Aut) - Literary Lab
COMPLIT 398L, ENGLISH 398L (Win, Spr) - Literary Text Mining 2: Studies in Cultural Analytics
ENGLISH 184F (Win) - Qualifying Exam Workshop
ENGLISH 398Q (Sum)
2022-23 Courses
- Literary Lab
COMPLIT 398L, ENGLISH 398L (Win, Spr) - New Technologies of Literature
ENGLISH 24N (Win) - Orals, Publication and Dissertation Workshop
ENGLISH 398W (Aut, Win, Spr) - Pedagogy Seminar I
ENGLISH 396L (Aut) - Qualifying Exam Workshop
ENGLISH 398Q (Sum)
2021-22 Courses
- Literary Lab
COMPLIT 398L, ENGLISH 398L (Win, Spr) - Literary Modeling
ENGLISH 384B (Win) - Orals, Publication and Dissertation Workshop
ENGLISH 398W (Aut, Win, Spr) - Pedagogy Seminar I
ENGLISH 396L (Aut) - Qualifying Exam Workshop
ENGLISH 398Q (Sum)
- Computationally Mapping the Literary Imagination
Stanford Advisees
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Merve Tekgurler -
Doctoral Dissertation Reader (AC)
Christopher Cappello, Jessica Monaco, Unjoo Oh, Sunil Persad, Alexander Sherman -
Doctoral Dissertation Advisor (AC)
Alexia Ainsworth, Carmen Thong -
Postdoctoral Research Mentor
Eric Harvey -
Doctoral (Program)
Luca Messarra, Carmen Thong, Sabrina Yates, Mayshu (Meixu) Zhan
All Publications
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Enlightenment Entanglements of Improvement and Growth
EXPLORATIONS IN THE DIGITAL HISTORY OF IDEAS
2024: 140-162
View details for Web of Science ID 001158554800007
- What's That Scary Sound? Ambient Sound in the Gothic Journal of Computational Literary Studies 2024; 2 (1): 1-28
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Embedded Ideas: Revolutionary Theory and Political Science in the Eighteenth Century
EXPLORATIONS IN THE DIGITAL HISTORY OF IDEAS
2024: 225-255
View details for DOI 10.1017/9781009263610.011
View details for Web of Science ID 001158554800011
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Modeling Therapy as Discourse in Twentieth-Century American Literature
AMERICAN LITERARY HISTORY
2023; 35 (3): 1235-1258
View details for DOI 10.1093/alh/ajad143
View details for Web of Science ID 001050235900006
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The Affordances of Mere Length: Computational Approaches to Short Story Analysis
The Cambridge Companion to the American Short Story
Cambridge University Press. 2023: 341-357
View details for DOI 10.1017/9781009292863.028
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THE ENDS OF DIGITAL HUMANITIES
ENDS OF KNOWLEDGE
2023: 75-87
View details for Web of Science ID 001101789400008
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"Looking as from a Distance on the World": Poetic Epistemologies of the Long Eighteenth Century
WORDSWORTH CIRCLE
2022; 53 (3): 291-310
View details for DOI 10.1086/720710
View details for Web of Science ID 000864731000003
- Computing Criticism: Humanities Concepts and Digital Methods Debates in the Digital Humanities: Computational Criticism University of Minnesota Press. 2021: 18-44
- Representing Race and Ethnicity in American Fiction: 1789-1920 Journal of Cultural Analytics 2020
- The Principals of Meaning: Networks of Knowledge in Johnson’s Dictionary Networks of European Enlightenment Oxford University Press. 2019
- The Novel as Data Cambridge Companion to the Novel Cambridge University Press. 2018
- The Long Arc of History: Neural Network Approaches to Diachronic Language Change Journal of the Japanese Association for Digital Humanities 2018; 3 (1): 1-32
- Distributed Character: Quantitative Models of the English Stage New Literary History 2017; 48 (4): 251-282
- Villainous or valiant? Depictions of oil and coal in American fiction and nonfiction narratives Energy Research & Social Science 2017; 31: 100-110
- Dialogism in the novel: A computational model of the dialogic nature of narration and quotations Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 2017; 32 (2): 31-52
- Canon/Archive. Large Scale Dynamics in the Literary Field Stanford Literary Lab. 2016 ; Literary Lab Pamphlet Series (11):
- Mapping the Emotions of London in Fiction: 1700-1900: A Crowdsourcing Experiment Literary Mapping in the Digital Age Routledge. 2016: 25–47
- Criticism and the Sublime Encyclopedia of British Literature 1660-1789 Blackwell Publishing. 2015
- Between Canon and Corpus: Six Perspectives on 20th-Century Novels Stanford Literary Lab. 2015 ; Literary Lab Pamphlet Series
- On Paragraphs. Scale, Theme and Narrative Form Stanford Literary Lab. 2015 ; Literary Lab Pamphlet Series
- The Werther Effect I: Goethe Topologically Distant Reading/Descriptive Turns: Topologies of German Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century Camden House. 2014: 155–184
- Aesthetics as Action: Publishing as Recursive Agency in the Long Eighteenth Century Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net 2010; 58: 1-21
- [Re]zoning the Naïve: Schiller’s Construction of Autohistoriography European Romantic Review 2003; 14 (2): 197-203