Mary Naydan

As Digital Humanities Project Manager, Mary provides project management oversight and guidance for CDH-sponsored projects. She supports Princeton faculty and students in the incubation, planning, implementation, and conclusion stages of their projects. Working closely with PIs, Research Software Engineers, and graduate student Project Managers, she consults regularly with project teams to problem-solve, track documentation, and coordinate events and publicity. Over the 2023-24 academic year, Mary will oversee all aspects of the final phase of the Princeton Prosody Archive, the CDH’s flagship project, in preparation for the CDH’s ten-year anniversary. She also collaborates with the Executive Director, Assistant Director, and Events and Office Administrator to assist with internal CDH administration and coordination of select events.

Mary’s research background is in twentieth-century Anglo-American literature, genre fiction, and poetry/poetics. Her dissertation, Forms of Fantasy: World-Building between the World Wars, draws on a wealth of digitized archival material—from readers’ letters and unpublished manuscripts, to radio listener statistics and film advertisements—to tell a new history of the modern Anglo-American fantasy genre’s formation between 1920–1940 within various media formats and communities of readers and writers.

Prior to joining the CDH as a staff member, Mary worked at the CDH as a Graduate Student Assistant, a Researcher for the Shakespeare and Company Project, a Project Manager for the Princeton Prosody Archive, and the Senior Project Management Fellow. She is passionate about best practices in data set curation, research software testing, and project management.