Rate My Professor Erin McCarthy

Erin McCarthy serves as Honorary Professor in the School of Humanities, Creative Industries and Social Science at the University of Newcastle, Australia, where she was appointed Lecturer in Digital Humanities and English in 2019 and promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2022. Her academic journey includes a PhD in English with an interdisciplinary certificate in Medieval and Renaissance Studies from The Ohio State University in 2012, supported by Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship and university fellowships; an MA from Ohio State in 2007; and a BA from Arizona State University in 2005. Previously, she was Postdoctoral Researcher on the ERC-funded RECIRC project at the National University of Ireland, Galway (2014-2018), Senior Research Fellow at Galway's Moore Institute (2022-2023), and held the Katharine F. Pantzer Jr. Fellowship at Harvard's Houghton Library in 2019. Currently, she is Established Professor of English Literature and Computational Humanities at the University of Galway, retaining her honorary affiliation with Newcastle.

Dr. McCarthy's research integrates digital humanities with early modern British literature, employing data-driven methods to explore how books were written, read, and circulated in the 16th and 17th centuries. Her interests encompass the history of reading, book history, manuscript studies, palaeography, poetry and poetics (including Shakespeare and Donne), women's writing, and computational humanities techniques such as coding, data visualization, and quantitative analysis. Key publication is her monograph Doubtful Readers: Print, Poetry, and the Reading Public in Early Modern England (Oxford University Press, 2020), which analyzes publishers' adaptations to new readers of printed poetry. She has contributed to scholarly journals including the John Donne Journal, SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, and Review of English Studies. Notable awards include the 2018 John Donne Society Kate Gartner Frost Award for Best Essay by an Early Career Scholar, 2021 Advance HE Fellowship, multiple Folger Institute Grant-in-Aids (2007,2008,2012,2015), Shakespeare Association of America Graduate Student Travel Awards (2010,2012), and the 2013 Society for the Study of Early Modern Women Graduate Student Conference Presentation Award. Her innovative approaches bridge historical literature with modern technology, offering insights into cultural responses to media changes.