Alexander Conroy

Alexander Conroy

PhD fellow

Research interests

I am interested in the quantitative and digital opening of literary history. How literature can be represented as data and metadata, and how language technology resources and machine learning models can be used to generate new insights into literary history.

PhD project
Working title: The fates of the Modern Breakthrough
Project period: 2021-2024
Supervisor: Jens Bjerring-Hansen
Funded by the Carlsberg Foundation

My PhD project aims to explore, not least through digital methods, the relation between modernity and central concepts within the Modern Breakthrough of Scandinavian literature. One of my main focuses is the concept of fate (skæbne), and by tracing and interpreting semantic patterns connected to this concept throughout the period, i.e., in the almost 900 Danish and Norwegian novels published in Denmark from 1870 to 1900, I am investigating how, and to what extent, these patterns convey modernity.

The project is part of MeMo - Measuring Modernity: Literary and Social Change in Scandinavia 1870-1900, PI: Jens Bjerring-Hansen

Primary areas of research

  • 19th century Scandinavian literature
  • Literary Historiography
  • Digital Humanities
  • Conceptual History
  • NLP

ID: 255974965