Team

The Orlando Project team includes researchers with expertise in women’s writing, literary history, humanities computing, and computing science. It has included, over time, Co-Investigators, Post-Doctoral Fellows, Research Associates, Graduate and Undergraduate Research Assistants, Systems Analysts and Programmers, Librarians, and technical and administrative support personnel.

the Orlando trio smaller

Susan Brown, Patricia Clements and Isobel Grundy have overall responsibility for the Orlando Project. The project began when they proposed to research and write a much-needed literary history and to deliver it electronically. It was a bold move: such an undertaking had not previously been attempted in kind, scale, or complexity, and at this stage in the development of digital humanities – the mid 1990s – it was by no means clear either that text encoding (markup) could produce meaningful results in so complex a field as literary history or even that an extensively encoded text could be effectively deployed and accessed on the internet. Nevertheless, Brown, Clements, and Grundy, traditionally trained and hitherto non-computational professors of English, set out to create a multidisciplinary team which could both produce a major history of women’s writing in the British Isles and conceive and build this as a digital history.

Summer_2013 thumbnailSusan Brown, Technical Director, is Canada Research Chair in Collaborative Digital Scholarship and Professor in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph, Visiting Professor in English and Film Studies and Humanities Computing, and a founding member of the Orlando Project. She is responsible for Victorian materials in the textbase. Her areas of research interest include Victorian women writers, Victorian poetry and poetics, the relationship of Victorian writing to diverse social fields including feminism, imperialism, and economics, and various aspects of the digital humanities. She was a contributor to the Feminist Companion to Literature in English and to the Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States, and has published essays in the Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry (ed. J. Bristow), Victorian Women Poets (ed. A. Chapman), Literature and Money (ed. A. Purdy), Gender and Colonialism (ed. S. Ryder et al), and in journals including Feminist Studies, Victorian Poetry, Victorian Review, English Studies in Canada, Literary and Linguistic Computing, and Digital Humanities Quarterly. She received a University of Guelph Faculty Association Special Merit Teaching Award in 1999. She leads the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory infrastructure project, which builds on Orlando’s pioneering work in online scholarly collaboration and is funded by the Canada Foundation for Innovation.

Patricia Clements, Founding Director of the Orlando Project and Principal Investigator on the original MCRI grant, directed the project from inception until publication. She is responsible for twentieth-century materials in the textbase. She is co-author/editor, with Virginia Blain and Isobel Grundy, of The Feminist Companion to Literature in English, 1990, the first reference work to women’s writing in the various literary traditions in English, and co-editor with Isobel Grundy of Virginia Woolf: New Critical Essays, 1983. She has published on nineteenth-century French and English poetry and prose: Baudelaire and the English Tradition, 1985; The Poems of Thomas Hardy, ed. with Juliet Grindle, 1980. She served two terms as Dean of Arts at the University of Alberta, and a term as President of the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada. She received a BA from the University of Alberta, a DPhil from the University of Oxford, and an honorary DLitt from Brock University. She is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Alberta and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. In 2015, Prof. Clements received an honorary DLitt from the University of Alberta.

Grundy.portrait thumbnailIsobel Grundy, Research Director, is Professor Emeritus at the University of Alberta. She received her degrees from the University of Oxford, where she was a member of St Anne’s College. Between her BA and her DPhil she worked for six years in Finland, London, and New York. She taught at Queen Mary College (now Queen Mary and Westfield College), London University, from 1971, then moved to the University of Alberta in 1990 as Henry Marshall Tory Professor. Her areas of research interest are women writers in English from the Medieval period through the long eighteenth century: favourite authors Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Samuel Johnson. She was one of the author/editors of The Feminist Companion. Her Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Comet of the Enlightenment appeared from Oxford University Press in 1999 (paperback 2001). She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. In September 2000 she was awarded the University of Alberta’s highest honour, the University Cup, for excellence in research and teaching.

Katherine Binhammer was a post-doctoral fellow on The Orlando Project (1995-97) and is pleased to be back as Literary Director. She is a Professor of English at the University of Alberta where she works on the history of the novel, eighteenth-century British cultural studies and feminist literary history. She has published Downward Mobility: The Form of Capital and the Sentimental Novel (Johns Hopkins UP, 2020) and The Seduction Narrative in Britain, 1747-1800 (Cambridge, 2009); recent essays have been published in Narrative,  The Cambridge Companion to Women’s Writing in Britain 1660-1789 and Women’s Writing 1660-1830: Feminisms, Fictions and Futures. 

Currently on leave, Corrinne Harol joined Orlando as its Literary Director in 2015. Dr. Harol is Associate Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies, University of Alberta, where she specializes in Restoration and eighteenth-century literature and culture. Her areas of research interest include the intersections of literary, scientific, political, and religious discourses; intellectual history and critical theory; feminist theory and gender studies. She is the author of Enlightened Virginity in Eighteenth-Century Literature as well as journal articles and book chapters on eighteenth-century literature.


Jeff Antoniuk joined the Orlando Project as Systems Analyst in 2002. He holds an MSc in Computing Science from the University of Alberta and a BSc from Brandon University. As a student at the University of Alberta, Jeff was a member of the Database System Research Group, and his interests include information retrieval and data-mining (knowledge discovery in data). In 2011 Jeff joined the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory as Senior Programmer.

Mihaela Ilovan, Project Manager for the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory, regularly shares her expertise and collaborates with the Orlando team. She recently completed her MLIS/MA in Humanities Computing at the University of Alberta. Her interests include the history of human-computer interaction, citation analysis, digital libraries, semantic annotation and user experience in a DH context.

Abigel Lemak, a long-serving Research Assistant based at the University of Guelph, plays a key role in the later stages of the workflow for each update to the Cambridge textbase and oversees significant parts of our ongoing interface revisions. She is a PhD candidate in Literary Studies at the University of Guelph.

Mariana Paredes-Olea, who holds an MA in Humanities Computing from the University of Alberta and an MA in Spanish from the University of Toronto, was Textbase Manager on the Orlando Project from January 2009 and Metadata Coordinator on CWRC from 2010 until 2012. She is now EBook Cataloguer and Metadata Assistant with the University of Alberta Library, but offers valuable assistance to Orlando on occasion.

Ruth Knechtel, was Textbase Manager on the Orlando Project and Metadata Coordinator on CWRC from 2012 until 2013. She is now Senior Manager, FANS (Funding Agencies and Non-Profit Sponsors) at the University of Waterloo.

CWRC students who have worked in collaboration with Orlando:  Kristi Abramoff, Anita Cutic, Sarah Davidson, Elena Dergacheva, Megan Gannett, Keah Hansen, Ashley Moroz, Breanna Mroczek, Ximena Flores Oviedo, Jessica Rattcliffe, Michaela Rye, Megan Sellmer, Thomas Smith, Larissa Swayze, Willow White.

Special thanks to those who have volunteered as research assistants: Kristi Abramoff, Justine Baskey, Abigail Chapman, Sydney Kruth, Brynn Lewis, and Alison Uttley. Erik Drebit and Kirsten Nicholson also contributed to the project in connection with coursework.

Co-Investigators on Grants Held

Renée Elio, former Project Co-investigator, became an NSERC Industrial Fellow Chair with the Alberta Research Council soon after receiving her PhD in Cognitive Psychology from Carnegie Mellon University. She was Associate Vice President (Research) of the Department of Computing Science at the University of Alberta from 2007 to 2013. She is currently a Professor of Computing Science at Alberta.

Rebecca Cameron, former Project Co-Investigator, first joined Orlando as a Post-Doctoral Fellow in 1999. In Fall 2002 she became Assistant Professor at the University of Saskatchewan, teaching modern British literature and drama. She is currently Associate Professor of English at DePaul University in Chicago.

Jo-Ann Wallace, former Project Co-Investigator, was Professor and Chair of Women’s Studies at the University of Alberta and is now Professor Emeritus. She is former Chair of the English Department, University of Alberta, and editor of English Studies in Canada. Her research areas include women’s literary modernism, feminist theory, and studies in “the child” and children’s literature.

Stan Ruecker, formerly Project Co-Investigator (and before that an Orlando GRA), is Anthony J. Petullo Professor in Graphic Design and a Design Research Fellow at the University of Illinois. Prior to this position he was an Associate Professor in the University of Alberta’s interdisciplinary Humanities Computing program, where he supervised graduate students and led seminars on experimental interface design, knowledge management and analysis, research methods, interdisciplinary research project management, and critical discourse analysis.

Advisory Panel During the Early Years

Virginia Blain, formerly Associate Professor of Victorian and Modern Literature at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, was one of the authors of The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women’s Writing from the Middle Ages to the Present. Her major works include Caroline Bowles Southey, 1786 – 1854: The Making of a Woman Writer, 1988.

The late Marilyn Butler, FRSL, FRSA, did major work on Romantic and eighteenth-century British Literature, and in feminist criticism and literary-historical methodology. Her major publications include Maria Edgeworth: a Literary Biography, 1972, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, 1975, and Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries, 1981. In December of 2015, a conference was held in her honour, Marilyn Butler and the War of Ideas, at Chawton House Library, with keynote speakers Professor Jim Chandler and Professor Heather Glen.

Paul Delany has co-edited two books in the area of computers and the humanities with George Landow: Hypermedia and Literary Studies, 1991, and The Digital Word: Text-Based Computing in the Humanities, 1993. He is Professor Emeritus of English.

Patricia Demers is Professor of English at the University of Alberta and was the first woman to be President of the Royal Society of Canada, 2005-2007. She was awarded the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal in 2012. Her major publications include The World of Hannah More, 1996; Heaven Upon Earth: The Form of Moral and Religious Children’s Literature to 1850, 1993; Women as Interpreters of the Bible, 1992; and P. L. Travers, 1991, and on CD-ROM, 1995.

Julia Flanders is based at Northeastern University, where she is Director of the Women Writers Project (Women Writers Online), Professor of Practice in the English Department (with an affiliation to the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks), and Director of the Digital Scholarship Group in the Northeastern University Library. She also is editor-in-chief of Digital Humanities Quarterly. Her research concerns include editorial theory and its relationship to electronic textuality, the history and gender politics of scholarly editing, and approaches to documentary transcription in TEI/SGML.

Susan Hockey has retired as Professor of Library and Information Studies at University College, London. Before that (1997-1999) she was Director of the Canadian Institute for Research Computing in the Arts at the University of Alberta, and before that (1991-1997) Director of the Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities (CETH), and (until 1991) Director of Computers in Teaching Initiative Centre for Textual Studies, Oxford University.

Ludmilla Jordanova is Professor of Visual Culture in the Department of History at Durham University. She has published widely on cultural history, gender, and medical history. Her books include The Look of the Past: Visual and Material Evidence in Historical Practice, 2012.

Peter J. M. Lown, QC, has an LLB (Hons.) from the University of Glasgow and a Master’s from the University of Saskatchewan. He was heavily involved in the development of computer databases and the integration of micro-computers into the teaching and practice of law.

The late Jane Marcus was Distinguished Professor of English at the City University of New York and the City College of New York. She helped found the women’s studies departments at University of Texas and University of Illinois at Chicago. Her publications include Virginia Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy, 1987. Her research interests were in modernism, feminist theory and criticism, canonicity, and women’s autobiography and biography.

Juliet McMaster, FRSC, is Professor Emeritus at the University of Alberta. Her publications include Jane Austen on Love, 1978. With R. D. McMaster, she wrote The Novel from Sterne to James, 1981. She has written widely on eighteenth and nineteenth-century literature, including much on George Eliot, Frances Burney, and Emily Brontë.

Patricia Prestwich is Professor Emeritus in the Department of History and Classics, University of Alberta. Her area of specialization is French history and she has worked in the areas of psychiatric history, particularly women and madness.

Bonnie Kime Scott, now Professor Emerita, was Professor of English and Women’s Studies at the University of Delaware and moved in 2001 to the Women’s Studies Department at San Diego State University. One of her most recent books is In the Hollow of the Wave: Virginia Woolf and Modernist Uses of Nature (2012).

Ann B. Shteir was Professor of Humanities and Women’s Studies at York University, now retired. Her research has been in eighteenth-century women’s writing, women’s writing and science culture, women and botanical culture. Her studies include Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science: Flora’s Daughters and Botany in England, 1760 to 1860, 1996.

Former Staff Members and Collaborators

Sharon Farnel, MA, MLIS, was Textbase Manager for the Orlando Project from 2000-2008. Currently, her work with the University of Alberta Library is in two areas. The first is web development, where she works as part of the team responsible for the look and feel, content and architecture of the Library’s website. The second is metadata, where she works as part of the digitization team on metadata structure and content for a variety of ongoing and upcoming digital projects with which the Library is involved. Her research interests include metadata standards and crosswalking, and the online information seeking behaviours of humanities scholars.

Benjamin Authers was a Grant Notley Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. His research has been published in such journals as University of Toronto Quarterly and The Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature.

Allen Renear, Project Co-investigator, received his PhD from Brown University, specializing in knowledge representation and the philosophy of science. At Brown, he became involved in a variety of text encoding and computing activities including participating in X3V1.TG8 (the ANSI Technical Group which developed SGML) and serving on the Advisory Board of the Text Encoding Initiative. He has served as Director of the Brown University Scholarly Technology Group in 1993, as well as Director of the Women Writers Project, President of the Association for Humanities Computing (ACH), and an adjunct Professor of English at the University of Alberta. He was recently Dean and Professor at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois.

Former Project Members

  • Nadine Adelaar
  • Barbara Alvarez
  • Nazareth Arabaghian
  • Dylan Armstrong
  • Michelle Balen
  • Nicole Barkwill
  • Neale Barnholden
  • Shauna Barry
  • Janice Beaveridge
  • Rebecca Blain
  • Rebecca Blasco
  • Melisa Brittain
  • Gideon Brobbey
  • Inge Brown
  • Jocelyn Brown
  • Pippa Brush
  • Adela Burke
  • Terry Butler
  • Kris Calhoun
  • Lara Carleton
  • Kathryn Carter
  • Jennifer Chambers
  • Ben Chen
  • Tina Cheng
  • Karen Chow
  • Joanna Cockerline
  • Amy Cote
  • Cindy Couldwell
  • Greg Coulombe
  • Tamara de Dominicis
  • Leslie Dema
  • Jason Dewinetz
  • Michelle Di Cintio
  • Lisa Dublin
  • Paul Dyck
  • Jana Smith Elford
  • Carmen Ellison
  • Barbara Falk
  • Colin Faulkner
  • Sue Fisher
  • Anna Ford
  • Alyson Fortowsky
  • Cody Gautreau
  • Ernst Gerhardt
  • Dave Gomboc
  • Cathy Grant
  • Michelle Gregory
  • George Grinnell
  • Alexandra Guselle
  • Katherine Hanz
  • Kathryn Harvey
  • Andrea Hasenbank
  • Jane Haslett
  • Rob Haslett
  • Debra Henderson
  • Lisa Hennigar
  • Catherine Higginson
  • Amanda Hooper
  • Karine Hopper
  • Deirdre Hunt
  • Chelsea Jack
  • Rob Jackson
  • Nikhil Jayadevan
  • Marilyn Jones
  • Nicole Keating
  • Shivaughn King
  • Devorah Kobluk
  • Deanna Kruger
  • Kate Lane-Smith
  • Joanna Langille
  • Julien Lapointe
  • Carolyn Lee
  • Nadine LeGier
  • Mary Elizabeth Leighton
  • Wai-mei Lui
  • Miriam Mabrouk
  • Andrew Mactavish
  • Roxanne Maharaj
  • Kristen Mandziuk
  • Ozma Mazood
  • Heather McAsh
  • Margaret McCutcheon
  • Mark McCutcheon
  • Karen McFadyen
  • Chelsea Miya
  • Aimée Morrison
  • Breanna Mroczek
  • Don Myroon
  • Bhuva Narayanan
  • Rachel Narvey
  • Catherine Nelson-McDermott
  • Tram Nguyen
  • Dempsey Nobert
  • Ananda Pellerin
  • Roland Penner
  • Mike Plouffe
  • Anthony Purgas
  • Elizabeth Quinn
  • Jessica Ratcliffe
  • Robyn Read
  • Ashley Reid
  • Cailin Rooke
  • Esther Rosario
  • Julie Ruel
  • Maitreyi Sanjay
  • Laura Schechter
  • Janice Schroeder
  • Jessie Scoble
  • Caley Skinner
  • Kayla Snyder
  • Kevin Spencer
  • Laura Stenberg
  • Sarah Timleck
  • Kristina Trevors
  • Jill Tzupa
  • Sylvia Vance
  • Jeanne Wood
  • Katherine Woodman
  • Samantha West