Dr Ryan Heuser, CDH
rj416@cam.ac.uk
Biographical Information
I am Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities at the University of Cambridge, where I teach for Cambridge Digital Humanities and the Faculty of English. I am a literary historian and computational humanist with over fifteen years’ experience in researching and teaching in the digital humanities. I completed my PhD in English from Stanford University in 2019, where I was a founding member of the Stanford Literary Lab and its Associate Research Director from 2011 to 2015. From 2019-2022 I was a postdoc in King’s College, Cambridge, where I am now a fellow; and from 2022-2024 I was Research Software Engineer in Princeton’s Center for Digital Humanities and KCL’s King’s Digital Lab.
You can also find me on my website, at CDH, Github, Google Scholar, Bluesky, or by email at rj416@cam.ac.uk.
Research Interests
My work applies computational methods to cultural history while conversely bringing the critical methods of cultural studies to bear on computation. I have written on topics from the ‘generative aesthetics’ of large language models to computational models of poetic rhythm and the degree of linguistic ‘abstraction’ in literary and intellectual history.
Areas of Graduate Supervision
Eighteenth-century studies and digital humanities
Selected Publications
- “Computational Hermeneutics: Evaluating Generative AI as a Cultural Technology.” Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, 26 February 2026. (Co-authored with Cody Kommers et al).
- “Cultural Collapse: Toward a Generative Formalism for AI Cultural Production.” Anthology of Computers and the Humanities, 3 (2025).
- “Generative Aesthetics: On Formal Stuckness in AI Verse.” Journal of Cultural Analytics, vol. 10, no. 3, Oct 2025.
- “Computing Koselleck: Modeling Semantic Revolutions, 1720-1960.” Explorations in the Digital History of Ideas. Ed. Pete de Bolla. Cambridge University Press. 2024.
- “Enlightenment Entanglements of Improvement and Growth.” Explorations in the Digital History of Ideas. Ed. Pete de Bolla. Cambridge University Press. 2024. (Co-authored with Peter de Bolla and Mark Algee-Hewitt).
- “Mapping London’s Emotions.” New Left Review 101 (2016): 63-91. (Co-authored with Franco Moretti and Erik Steiner)
- “Mapping the Emotions of London in Fiction, 1700-1900: A Crowdsourcing Experiment.” Literary Mapping in the Digital Age. Ed. David Cooper, Chris Donaldson, and Patricia Murrieta-Flores. Ashgate. 2016. (Co-authored with Mark Algee-Hewitt, Van Tran, Annalise Lockhart, and Erik Steiner).
- “A Quantitative Literary History of 2,958 Nineteenth-Century British Novels: The Semantic Cohort Method.” Stanford Literary Lab 4 (2012). (Co-authored with Long Le-Khac).
- “Learning to Read Data: Bringing out the Humanistic in the Digital Humanities.” Victorian Studies 54.1 (2011): 79-86. (Co-authored with Long Le-Khac).
