Stephen Osadetz

Stephen Osadetz works at the intersection of the digital humanities, literary studies, and intellectual history. A central thread of his work addresses the theoretical and practical challenges of searching vast digital archives. This research has led him to develop a search engine that enables exploratory, passage-level semantic search, opening not only more precise and comprehensive views of the historical record, but also the possibility of an approach to computational scholarship grounded in the the interpretive practices of the humanities.

His work in the digital humanities informs his traditional scholarship, which includes a current book project, On Principle: Newton to Coleridge, examining the Enlightenment’s effort to distill entire fields of knowledge into single sentences. He was an Assistant Professor in Harvard’s Department of English from 2014 to 2019 and currently serves as Faculty Director for “The Digital Humanities in Practice,” a course he designed for Harvard Online that has enrolled thousands of students around the world.