Professor

Research Interests

Text mining in large digital libraries, Modeling literary concepts with machine learning, 18-19c British literature, History of 18-19c science, Sociology of cultural distinction

Education

English, Ph.D, Cornell University

Ph.D, Cornell University, 1997

Additional Campus Affiliations

Professor, School of Information Sciences
Professor, English

Highlighted Publications

Underwood, T. (2019). Distant Horizons: Digital Evidence and Literary Change. University of Chicago Press. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226612973.001.0001

Underwood, W. E. (2013). Why Literary Periods Mattered: Historical Contrast and the Prestige of English Studies. Stanford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780804788441

Underwood, T. (2005). The Work of the Sun: Literature, Science, and Political Economy, 1760-1860. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403981905

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Recent Publications

Hu, Y., Diesner, J., Underwood, T., LeBlanc, Z., Layne-Worthey, G., & Downie, J. S. (2025). Who decides what is read on Goodreads? Uncovering sponsorship and its implications for scholarly Research. Big Data and Society, 12(3), Article 20539517251359229. https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517251359229

Layne-Worthey, G., Downie, J. S., Swatscheno, J., Parulian, N., Naiman, J., Schmidt, B., Organisciak, P., Underwood, T., & Dubnicek, R. (2025). Making more sense with machines: artificial intelligence at the HathiTrust Research Center. In L. Jaillant, C. Warwick, P. Gooding, K. Aske, G. Layne-Worthey, & J. S. Downie (Eds.), Navigating Artificial Intelligence for Cultural Heritage Organisations (pp. 135-166). UCL Press.

Shang, W., & Underwood, T. (2025). Disentangling semantic and prosodic features of English poetry. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 40(Supplement_1), i87-i99. Article fqae008. https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqae008

Underwood, T. (2025). The impact of language models on the humanities and vice versa. Nature Computational Science. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1038/s43588-025-00819-4

Griebel, S., Cohen, B., Li, L., Park, J., Liu, J., Perkins, J., & Underwood, T. (2024). Locating the Leading Edge of Cultural Change. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, 3834, 232-245.

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