New professor brings more poetry, math, digital humanities to ASU

The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences' new assistant professor, Jacqueline Wernimont, brings much more than English to Arizona State University's Department of English.

As an assistant professor of English at Scripps College in California, Wernimont focused on 16th- and 17th-century British literature, mathematics, history of science and digital humanities. She has been a pioneer in areas where feminism and digital humanities intersect, participating in creative efforts such as the world’s first Distributed Online Collaborative Course, a feminist response to Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs), and the Feminist Scholars Digital Workshop.

One past result of her interdisciplinary interests was an experiment she conducted with a student to transform a poem into an algorithm, and then into a 3-D object.

“There is a sense that humanities are in many ways late to the digital game,” says Wernimont, “and while digital humanities is a relatively new field, questions about relationships of technology to humanistic inquiry aren’t new at all. They date back at least to Plato’s concern with the value of poetry.”

Wernimont looks forward to continuing these types of conversations and working with ASU students in the true spirit of interdisciplinarity at the New American University. She earned her bachelor's from the University of Iowa and her master's and doctorate from Brown University.

The School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies and the Department of English are academic units in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Arizona State University.

Written by Beatriz Kravetz, beatriz.kravetz@asu.edu