Staff Profiles

Erin A. McCarthy is Established Professor of English Literature and Computational Humanities. She is also the Principal Investigator of the Irish Research Council and European Research Council-funded project "STEMMA: Systems of Transmitting Early Modern Manuscript Verse, 1475-1700." She is a graduate of Arizona State University (BA 2005) and The Ohio State University (MA 2007; PhD with Certificate in Medieval and Renaissance Studies 2012). Her doctoral work was supported by an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in Humanistic Studies and OSU's University and Presidential Fellowships. 

From 2014 to 2018, she was a postdoctoral researcher on the European Research Council-funded project "RECIRC: The Reception and Circulation of Early Modern Women's Writing, 1550-1700." In 2019, she held the Katharine F. Pantzer Jr. Fellowship in Descriptive Bibliography at Harvard University's Houghton Library before taking up her appointment as Lecturer in Digital Humanities and English at the University of Newcastle (Australia). She was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2022 and retains an affiliation with UON as an Honorary Professor. 

Most recently, Erin has been awarded an IRC Consolidator Laureate Award and an ERC Consolidator grant for her project "STEMMA: Systems of Transmitting Early Modern Manuscript Verse." The project, which runs from September 2022 to August 2028, computationally maps and models the movement of English poetry through early modern social networks. It will apply insights from network analysis and graph theory to provide the most comprehensive overview of the circulation of early modern English verse in manuscript to date. 

Erin is the author of Doubtful Readers: Print, Poetry, and the Reading Public (Oxford University Press, 2020), which was named an Outstanding Academic Title by CHOICE in 2021. She is currently completing a second monograph, "The Reception and Circulation of Early Modern Women¿s Writing in Manuscript Miscellanies, 1550-1700," with Marie-Louise Coolahan and Sajed Chowdhury. Her scholarship has also appeared in the journals John Donne Journal, SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, the Review of English Studies, and Criticism as well edited collections, reference works, and online publications.