Stephen Osadetz

Stephen Osadetz, Faculty Director of "The Digital Humanities in Practice" and Associate of the Department of English at Harvard University, has transformed digital literary research through innovative search technologies. After serving as Assistant Professor in Harvard's English Department (2014-2019), he has focused on bridging traditional literary scholarship with advanced digital methods. As director of the Open Books Project, he leads the development of a groundbreaking concept search engine that moves beyond simple keyword searches to find complex ideas across large digital collections, particularly within the Eighteenth Century Collections Online corpus. His research explores how Enlightenment intellectuals attempted to distill entire disciplines into single principles, while his current work on the Open Books platform enables scholars to search through millions of textual passages using sophisticated concept-based queries. Through his leadership of Harvard's digital humanities initiatives and development of new research tools, he continues to advance methods for discovering and analyzing patterns in historical texts