Michael Fox

Teaching Assistant Professor, UNC School of Information and Library Science; Assistant Editor, William Blake Archive

Phone

(919) 962-8366

Email

foxm@unc.edu

Office

Manning Hall - 23

Expertise

Information Science: digital humanities, philosophy and ethics of AI, natural language processing; English: Aestheticism and aesthetics, literary history, history of literary criticism, poetics, textual studies.

Education

BS (Computer Science), University of Virginia
MA (English), University of Virginia
PhD (English), University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Biography

Dr. Michael Fox is a Teaching Assistant Professor for the UNC School of Information and Library Science (SILS), and since 2013 has been an Assistant Editor of the William Blake Archive. The Blake Archive, an award-winning digital humanities project, publishes critical editions of Blake’s poetry and art about every two months, provides digital tools, including an API, for facilitating scholarly study of the editions, and hosts online exhibitions curated by invited scholars. In the fall of 2024, Dr. Fox will begin serving on the editorial board of the journal Textual Cultures: Texts, Contexts, Interpretation, the official publication of the Society for Textual Scholarship. His research varies but is usually humanities-oriented, and he has taught widely, from literature to information science courses.

Before coming to SILS, he was a Senior Lecturer for the Digital Studies of Language, Culture, and History program at the University of Chicago, and served as its Academic Director. His background includes a Ph.D. and M.A. in English, a B.S. in Computer Science (with a minor in Applied Math), and several years of experience as a research computing consultant for the University of Virginia Alliance for Computational Science and Engineering, now called Research Computing.

Courses

Semiotics of Culture
Introduction to Digital Humanities
Philosophy and Ethics of AI (now called The Idea of AI)
Applications of Natural Language Processing

Awards

The Association for Documentary Editing (ADE) 2017 Featured Project—The Redesign of the William Blake Archive, 2017 (This distinction was given to the Blake Archive as a whole.)

Publications

SELECTED ACADEMIC WRITING

“Clusters and Graphs: Revealing and Modeling Documentary Indefiniteness.” Textual Cultures: Texts, Contexts, Interpretations, forthcoming in vol. 18, no. 1, 2025.

“History and the Self in Wilde’s ‘The Portrait of Mr. W. H.’” Literary Imagination, Advance Article (volume and issue forthcoming), 2024.

“Graphing VALA, or the Four Zoas: Toward a Dynamic Edition.” William Blake’s Manuscripts: Praxis, Puzzles, and Palimpsests, edited by Mark Crosby and Josephine A. McQuail, Palgrave Macmillan, 2024.

“‘All Relate to Art’: The William Blake Archive and Its Web of Relations.” Digital Humanities Quarterly, vol. 12, no. 1, 2018. (With Joseph Fletcher).

“The Upgrade of the William Blake Archive.” Amodern, vol. 8, 2018.

“Approximating Component Selection.” Proceedings of the 2004 ACM/IEEE Winter Simulation Conference, 2004. (Primary author, with David Brogan and Paul F. Reynolds).