Abigail Droge joins WE1S after completing her Ph.D. in 2018 in English at Stanford University and participating in the Stanford Literary Lab. Abigail works at the intersection of nineteenth-century British literature and science, the sociology of reading, and twenty-first-century pedagogy. Her dissertation on “Reading Skills: The Politics of Literacy in the Nineteenth and Twenty-First Centuries” focuses on working- and middle-class literacy movements in Victorian England, and studies how reading literature was perceived as a skill that could create or break social bonds. She is interested broadly in how the humanities, and literature, can be engaged in society—past and present, individual and collective, and personal and public. For example, she explores how the teaching of literature and the teaching of science can complement each other in the era of Silicon Valley. (See her article “Teaching Literature and Science in Silicon Valley” reporting on teaching a course to Stanford undergraduates with backgrounds in English, biology, and computer science.) Abigail’s work specifically complements the efforts of WE1S to imagine creative ways to research and advocate for the engagement of the humanities in contemporary society. Her familiarity with text-analysis methods, gained through participation in such Stanford Literary Lab projects as Suspense: A Study in Digital Narratology (in progress), allows her work to dovetail even more closely with the WE1S project.

Abigail can be reached at adroge@ucsb.edu