More About This Project

Bridget Draxler

Bridget Draxler has been developing Austen-themed public digital humanities projects since 2009. She participated in the NEH seminar “Jane Austen and Her Contemporaries” in 2012, was a research fellow at Chawton House Library in 2011, and co-edited a 2014 special issue of Persuasions On-Line about teaching Austen, to which she contributed an article on using archival research and digital tools in the undergraduate classroom to teach Austen. Her interest in the public digital humanities stems from experiences as a HASTAC Scholar, a PAGE Fellow for Imagining America, and a graduate fellow in the Obermann Graduate Institute on Engagement and the Academy. She currently works at her alma mater, St. Olaf College, where she enjoys mentoring students as readers, writers, and thinkers.

Sarah Hindman ’18

Sarah Hindman will graduate from St. Olaf College in 2018 with a double-major in Political Science and Religion, as well as a concentration in Africa and the Americas. Within the field of Political Science, she enjoys studying European politics, which sparked her interest in Austen’s Northanger Abbey.

Joseph Putnam ’18

Joseph Putnam will graduate from St. Olaf College in 2018 with a B.A. in English and American Studies. He studies material culture,  mid-nineteenth-century U.S. literature, postcolonial literature of the Americas, literary theory, and ecocriticism/the environmental humanities. Approaching Austen from a standpoint that considers the relationships between literature, culture, and colonialism, he is interested in interrogating the complex ways Austen’s texts respond to British imperialism throughout the Indian subcontinent and the Atlantic world.  

Elissa Temme ’19

Elissa Temme will graduate from St. Olaf College in 2019 with an individual major in Integrated Marketing Communications, New Media and Graphic Design through St. Olaf’s Center for Integrative Studies. Elissa is passionate about literature, art, design, storytelling, and many forms of media.

Special Thanks

This project was funded by CURI, the St. Olaf College Collaborative Undergraduate Research and Inquiry program, and “Digital Humanities on the Hill,” an initiative made possible by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

The Jane Austen in Community project would not have been possible without the following organizations and individuals:

Maggie Epstein, Research & Instruction Librarian, Rolvaag Memorial Library

Matthew Gustafson, Associate Director of Alumni and Parent Relations, St. Olaf College

St. Olaf DiSCO (Digital Scholarship Center)

Jason Menard, Geospatial Instructional Technologist, St. Olaf College DiSCO

Ezra Plemons, Multimedia Instructional Technologist, St. Olaf College DiSCO

Kasia Gonnerman, Head of Reference and Instruction, St. Olaf College

Joan Ennis, Reference and Readers Services Librarian, Northfield Public Library

Katie Felland, Arts and Volunteer Coordinator, Northfield Senior Center