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
External Links
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
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, 5(9), 695-697. 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.