Affiliated Faculty from the Department of English

Angelica Duran (Professor)
Professor Angelica Duran’s research branch of interlingual and intermediate translation is evidenced by her award-winning volumes Milton Across Borders and Media (Oxford UP, 2023) and Milton in Translation (Oxford UP, 2017), as well as her Spanish-to-English co-translations published in the scholarly journal Milton Quarterly (2023 and 2017). Her current translations and research consider how AI’s capacities and limitations interface with the enduring matters of poetic energy, prosody, and accuracy of denotations and connotations, as well as the personal mental capacities and pleasures involved in translation of literary works as much as plain communicative language.

Michael Johnston (Professor)
As a scholar of medieval English literature, I focus particularly on how texts were produced and disseminated in the period leading up to the printing press. As I argued in my most recent monograph, The Middle English Book, within manuscript culture, agency proliferated across culture and was largely decentered. It was, I argue, the printing press which centralized the processes of literary production—and, hence, authority. This process of centralizing literary authority into the printed book held until recent technological innovations disrupted things, presaging a new paradigm—the most profound of which is, of course, AI. I firmly believe that scholars of the premodern world should play a key role in understanding the impact of AI on authorship, and I would be interested in advising graduate students who wish to pursue research on these questions.

Michael Salvo (Professor)
Professor Salvo’s recent work focuses on Artificial Intelligence, delivering deepfake videos of rhetorical luminaries at recent international conferences and discussing the impacts of emergent technology on literacy practice in professional and academic context.

Paul White (Professor)
Paul White is the director of Shakespeare’s Theaterscape, an NEH- and Purdue-funded collaborative research project that brings together scholars in literature, history, data science and geomatics to reconstruct playhouse communities in early modern London. This past year he led a pedagogical study funded by Purdue’s Innovation Hub and the Lilly Foundation to develop new resources and strategies for incorporating AI-enhanced methods of learning in the humanities, using a Shakespeare course as the project’s case study.  The major aim of this work is to empower students to engage with humanities subjects—history, literature, and cultural studies—in more visual, interactive and meaningful ways by integrating technology into their experience of learning and research.