Research
At The University of Manchester, research at the intersection of digital technology, society and culture is conducted across the four Schools of the Faculty of Humanities.
Our research specialisms
Giulia Grisot is a Lecturer in Digital Humanities at the University of Manchester.
Her research focuses on the investigation of cultures and identities in literary and non-literary texts, using NLP and machine learning to examine represented space and encoded sentiments.
As an applied linguist, she is interested in the mechanisms by which humans process and understand language and literature, and in the ways linguistic data can be explored computationally.
Before joining Manchester, Giulia was a Teaching Associate at the University of Cambridge's Cambridge Digital Humanities (CDH), where she designed and taught courses in Distant Reading, R for Digital Humanities, and Sentiment Analysis.
She previously held a postdoctoral research position at Bielefeld University, where she worked on the project "High Mountains Low Arousal? Distant Reading Topographies of Sentiment in German Swiss Novels in the Early 20th Century," offering insights into literary emotional landscapes.
Her research has been published in the Journal of Cultural Analytics and presented at the Computational Humanities Research Conference.
She completed her PhD in Applied Linguistics at The University of Nottingham, where she also earned an MA in Literary Linguistics.
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Dr Hind is a Lecturer in Digital Media and Culture and Programme Director of the MA in Digital Media, Culture and Society.
He has an MSc in Geographical Information Science (GIS) from The University of Manchester, and a PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies from the University of Warwick.
His research interests include digital navigation, machine vision, algorithmic decision-making, platform (auto)mobility, and mobile play.
His expertise lies at the intersection of media studies, science and technology studies (STS), and digital geographies.
Before joining The University of Manchester in September 2022, he was a research assistant in SFB1187 Media of Cooperation at the University of Siegen, Germany, on sub-project ‘Digital Navigation in Online/Offline Spaces’.
He has published in New Media and Society, Big Data and Society, Mobilities, Social Media and Society, Political Geography, and Convergence.
He is the co-author of Playful Mapping in the Digital Age (Institute of Network Cultures, 2016), and co-editor of Time for Mapping (MUP, 2018), and Interrogating Datafication (Transcript, 2022).
He is currently writing a monograph on the phenomenon of autonomous driving, provisionally entitled Driving Decisions: How Autonomous Vehicles Make Sense of the World (Palgrave).
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Dr Mattheis (she/her) is a Lecturer in Digital Media and Culture.
She holds a (post)graduate certificate in Women’s and Gender studies along with an M.A. and PhD. in Communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Her research interests include digital extremist cultures’ (Manosphere, Far Right, #Trad, and QAnon) propaganda materials, gendered communicative approaches, and economies of digital media circulation.
Her expertise lies at the intersection of critical media studies, visual rhetorical criticism, and digital cultural analyses through the lens of feminist STS and Black feminist theories.
In the past, she was a postdoctoral researcher in the School of Law and Government at Dublin City University working on the Tech Against Terrorism Europe Project (2023-2024) and at the Cyber Threats Research Centre (CYTREC) in the Hillary Rodham Clinton School of Law at Swansea University (2022-2023), where she remains an affiliate.
Her publications include articles in such journals as Policy and Internet, the Journal for Deradicalization, and the CTC Sentinel. Her policy and community facing work can be found via the Resolve Network, RAN Europe, Peace Tech Labs, and Tech Soup’s Game Changer program.
She has also contributed to public scholarship on the VOX-Pol Blog and GNET Insights as well as recorded podcast episodes for Right Rising, Yeah Nah Pasaran!, and Battle Rhythm.
She is an Associate Editor at the journal Perspectives on Terrorism and a Leadership Team member of the VOX-Pol Research Network. She has previously held network fellowships with the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right (2019-2022), the Global Network on Extremism and Technology (2020-2021), and the Institute for Research on Male Supremacism (2019-2022).
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Dr Reddleman is a Lecturer in Digital Humanities (Contemporary Art and Digital Culture).
Her research and creative interests are in maps, contemporary art, photography and digital collage, surveillance, and the critique of capitalism.
She is the author of Cartographic Abstraction in Contemporary Art: Seeing with Maps (2018), which theorises abstract modes of viewing with artworks and maps.
Dr Reddleman's articles have appeared in Humanities, GeoHumanities, Socialism and Democracy and the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, and creative work in Living Maps Review.
A recent book chapter addresses cartographic depictions of the former penal colonies in French Guiana and New Caledonia.
Her book Pennine Street: A Cartographic Fiction is forthcoming, and combines creative writing and original artwork to critique capitalist abstraction.
Prior to joining The University of Manchester in 2021, Dr Reddleman taught digital humanities at King’s College London, and held an AHRC-funded postdoctoral fellowship on the project ‘Postcards from the bagne’ investigating the heritage representation of France’s former penal colonies.
Dr Reddleman gained a PhD in cultural studies from Goldsmiths, University of London, as well as MA in Art and Politics, and a BA (Hons) in History of Art and Architecture at the University of Reading.
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Dr Scholz is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities.
His research is concerned with analysing and questioning data in historical and humanistic inquiry.
He combines archival research, computational methods, and visualisation to study spatial history, intellectual history, and the representation of weather and climate.
His first monograph, Borders and Freedom of Movement in the Holy Roman Empire, was published with Oxford University Press in 2020.
Other writings have appeared in such journals as Past and Present, The Historical Journal, Cartographica, and Quaderni Storici.
Before joining The University of Manchester, he held a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Stanford University from 2016 to 2019, where he also led the digital mapping project ‘New Maps for the Old Regime’.
Dr Scholz earned a PhD in History at the European University Institute in Florence, an MA in History at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris and the University of Heidelberg, as well as a BA in Economics at the latter university.
He also taught at the Free University of Berlin and has been a visiting scholar at the University of Saint Andrews and at Columbia University.
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Dr Szulc (he/him) is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Media and Culture, and Programme Director of the BA in Digital Media, Culture and Society.
He specialises in critical and cultural studies of digital media at the intersections of gender, sexuality and transnationalism, with a particular focus on Central and Eastern Europe, especially Poland.
In the past, he was a Lecturer in Digital Media and Society at the University of Sheffield (2018-2022) and a postdoctoral fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science (EU Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship, 2017-2019) and at the University of Antwerp (Research Foundation Flanders Fellowship, 2015-2017).
His publications include a monograph Transnational Homosexuals in Communist Poland: Cross-Border Flows in Gay and Lesbian Magazines (Palgrave, 2018), a co-edited collection LGBTQs, Media, and Culture in Europe (Routledge, 2016), and numerous articles in such journals as Communication Theory, New Media and Society, and Social Media and Society.
Dr Szulc sat on the board of directors at the International Communication Association (ICA) and was a co-chair of ICA’s LGBTQ Studies interest group between 2017 and 2021.
He is a member of editorial boards at the International Journal of Cultural Studies, International Journal of Communication, and Communication, Culture and Critique.
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Dr Taylor is Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Digital Humanities, based in the department of English Literature, American Studies, and Creative Writing.
Her research bridges the frontier between literary studies, digital and environmental humanities research.
It has been published across more than forty peer-reviewed publications in literary studies, geography, and digital humanities.
Her book, co-authored with Ian Gregory, is titled Deep Mapping the Literary Lake District (Bucknell University Press, 2022).
It deploys innovative methods from literary studies, corpus linguistics, historical geography, and geographical information science to re-assess the literary history of a region whose topography has been long recognized as fundamental to the shape of the poetry and prose produced within it.
Her current research, in collaboration with colleagues across geography and ecology, considers how historical texts might speak to environmental futures.
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Dr Wang is a Lecturer in Digital Media and Culture.
He obtained a PhD in Media Studies from the University of Amsterdam.
His research lies at the intersection of platform studies, critical algorithm studies, digital economy, and queer media.
Much of his research has been devoted to understanding LGBTQ communities in both queer-focused (e.g. dating and livestreaming apps) and mainstream (e.g. Twitter and Douyin) social media.
Additionally, he is working on how data transform social media operations in the current economic and geopolitical context, focusing on Douyin and TikTok.
Dr Wang's work has been published in peer-reviewed academic journals such as Information, Communication and Society, Television and New Media, Media, Culture and Society, Social Media and Society, and Sexualities.
He is the principal investigator of two funded projects ‘Douyin Data Economies’ (100,000 CNY) and ‘Algorithmic Configurations of Sexuality’ (30,000 EUR).
Prior to his current appointment at The University of Manchester, Dr Wang was an Assistant Professor of Media and Communication at the Sino-British joint venture Xi’an Jiaotong - Liverpool University (2022-2023) and a Lecturer in New Media and Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam (2020-2022).