Five Faculty Members Recognized with Academic Promotions

Professor of Digital Humanities Crystal Hall
With a varied array of research and teaching interests that include digital humanities research and pedagogy, early modern Italian literature, science and literature, Renaissance Florence, and second language acquisition, Crystal Hall has taught courses that include How to Read 1,000,000 Books, Introduction to Digital and Computational Studies, and Data-Driven Societies, among others. She has focused her scholarship into various publications, including Galileo's Library: Data, Methods, and the Humanities (forthcoming with Oxford University Press) and How Digital Artifacts Are Accountable, in development with DCS colleagues Eric Chown and Fernando Nascimento. She collaborated with another colleague, Birgit Tautz, on the edited volume German and European Cultural Histories 1760-1830: Between Network and Narrative (Liverpool University Press, 2024) and is the author of dozens of book chapters, peer-reviewed articles, and reviews. Her peer-reviewed article "The Versions of Vincenzo Viviani's Library," written in 2025 with two first-year students, was published in Bibliothecae.

Hall is also a frequent conference presenter and lecturer; earlier this year, she was joined by two of her students at a literary festival in Florence, Italy, as they shared results of their data-driven analysis of the contribution of female writers promoting the creative labor of Italian women at the turn of the twentieth century. Her most recent project, again in partnership with Bowdoin students and collaborators, examines the potentials and pitfalls of using large language models as tools for historical research. Hall, who arrived at Bowdoin in 2013, earned her bachelor's degree at Cornell University before earning a master's degree and doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania.

"Working on computational text analysis right now is offering valuable insight about how large language models function and their impact on human expression," Hall said. "Broadly, the collaborative environment with colleagues across the divisions and students from such a variety of majors enriches every project in valuable and unexpected ways."