Associate Professor of English

Shawna
Ross

Department of English — Texas A&M University

Scholar of modernist and Victorian literature, digital humanities, and ecocriticism. Author of books on Charlotte Brontë, digital pedagogy, and the intersections of literary form and technology.

Shawna Ross, Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M University
Texas A&M University, 2025
5
Authored & Edited Books
20+
Refereed Articles
20+
Book Reviews & Essays
2026
Cambridge UP Book in Progress
6
Major Awards (2021–2026)

Research

Victorian Studies

Charlotte Brontë & the Anthropocene

Reinterpreting the Brontë oeuvre through environmental humanities, tracing images of ecological devastation and the interpenetration of human and nonhuman histories of Yorkshire.

Digital Humanities

Modernist Literature & Digital Preservation

Exploring minimal computing, digital archives, and the scholarly infrastructure of modernist poetry—from textual labor to avant-garde preservation in the digital age.

Pedagogy

Digital Pedagogy & the Classroom

Practical and theoretical frameworks for integrating digital humanities methods into literary education, from minimal digital editions to multimodal composition and online teaching.

Books

2026
(est.)

The Minimal Avant-Garde: Modernist Poetry and Digital Preservation

Cambridge University Press — Elements in Digital Literary Studies

Under contract. Examines the relationship between minimal computing approaches and the digital preservation of modernist poetic traditions.

2022

Using Digital Humanities in the Classroom: A Practical Introduction for Students, Teachers, and Lecturers

Bloomsbury Academic (2nd ed.) — with Claire Battershill

A step-by-step primer for digital humanities pedagogy, now in its second edition and translated into Korean (HanulMPlus, 2025). Reviewed in Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Iperstoria, and Chronicle of Higher Education.

2021

Charlotte Brontë at the Anthropocene

SUNY Press (paperback reprint)

Reinterprets Brontë’s oeuvre as one of the first literary ecosystems of the Anthropocene, showing how she creates images of environmental devastation and narrates the interpenetration of human and nonhuman histories of Yorkshire. 320 pages. Honorable Mention, Sonya Rudikoff Award for Best First Book in Victorian Studies. Reviewed in Victorian Studies, ISLE, Journal of British Studies, SEL, and English Studies.

2019

Humans at Work in the Digital Age: Forms of Digital Textual Labor

Routledge (paperback 2021) — co-edited with Andrew Pilsch

Recovers the hidden textual labors—writing, interpreting, and processing text—that underpin digital technologies. 276 pages. Reviewed in Choice.

2016

Reading Modernism with Machines: Digital Humanities and Modernist Literature

Palgrave Macmillan — co-edited with James O’Sullivan

An edited collection bringing digital humanities methods to bear on modernist literary studies. 301 pages. Reviewed in Oxford’s The Year’s Work in English Studies.

Selected Articles & Chapters

The Globe in Glass Town: Mobilities, Textual and Terrestrial

Introduction: The Brontës and the Wild

Three Gatherings of Brontëan Flora and Fauna: Myth, Parsonage, Literature

Labor, Alienation, and the Digital Humanities

Landslide at the Pension Bertolini: Anti-Tourism in E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View

Remembering the 1824 Crow Hill Bog Burst: Patrick Brontë as a Science Writer

Disconsolate Tenants of the Metabolic Rift: An Anthropocene Feminist View of Farming in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Sightseeing the Anthropocene: Tourism, Moorland Management, and The Hound of the Baskervilles

Networks: Modernism in Circulation, 1920–2020

Toward a Feminist Modernist Digital Humanities

Ocean Liner Cutaways, Diagrams, and Composites: Technical Illustration as Mass Aesthetic

Hashtags, Compression Algorithms, and Henry James’s Late Style

Teaching

Graduate Seminars

  • New Approaches to the BrontësENGL 638
  • Post-Digital Textual MaterialityENGL 604
  • Bibliography & Literary Research MethodsENGL 603
  • Virginia Woolf and the Intellectual LifeENGL 653
  • Freud and British ModernismENGL 653
  • Transatlantic Modernist PoetryENGL 653

Undergraduate Courses

  • 20th Century Literature to World War IIENGL 350
  • The British Novel Since 1870ENGL 378
  • Studies in a Major Author: Charlotte BrontëENGL 415
  • Studies in a Major Author: Virginia WoolfENGL 415
  • Human Thinking and Digital CultureENGL 207
  • Women Writers of Golden Age Detective FictionENGL 394
  • Approaches to English Studies: Sherlock HolmesENGL 303
  • Digital ModernismENGL 390

Awards

Elton Lewis Faculty Fellowship in the Liberal Arts

Texas A&M University — Jan. 2026–Dec. 2028

Arts & Humanities Fellowship

Texas A&M Division of Research — Sep. 2025–Aug. 2028

Faculty Excellence Award

Texas A&M College of Arts & Sciences — 2025

Distinguished Achievement Award for Teaching (College Level)

Texas A&M Association of Former Students — 2021–22

Excellence in Scholarly Writing Honours

Arthur Conan Doyle Society — 2022

Honorable Mention, Sonya Rudikoff Award for Best First Book in Victorian Studies

Northeast Victorian Studies Association — 2020

Contact

Department of English
Texas A&M University

Email shawnaross@tamu.edu
Position Associate Professor of English
Fields Modernist Literature · Victorian Literature · Digital Humanities
“Recovering the hidden textual labors that underpin digital technologies—writing, interpreting, and processing text—at the intersection of literary history and the digital age.”
Research Program