About
My career has been defined by showing that the apparent gap between computational logic and human emotional expression instead reveals a fundamental link: coded, compact human expression. Through my investigations of material and conceptual networks of medieval textual production, I have become increasingly oriented toward computational methods and interdisciplinary collaboration. As a scholar with an integrated profile in Old and Middle English, manuscript studies, and the digital humanities, I ground humanistic inquiry in the technical literacies many students already possess.
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Teaching Philosophy
My teaching philosophy rests on the supposition that humans remain relatively stable in the face of technological shifts—and that it is my responsibility to teach them not how to be a new kind of human but to be delightedly human in environments often hostile to that delight. I develop courses that explicitly address the clash of disciplinary intuitions, teaching students how to articulate expertise and the instincts of expertise for their collaborators—essential for effective teamwork between literary scholars, linguists, and computer scientists.
My teaching is shaped by the belief that computational techniques give humanists effective tools to solve problems they can well articulate. By thinking about documents as designed objects and language as variously capable of compression, I help students develop practical skills (e.g. what is a paragraph designed to do?) and metacognitive awareness (e.g. what tools do I use to determine a writer's motivation?) essential to interpreting a wide range of documents. My teaching is driven by a commitment to fostering a rapid and lasting sense of belonging that affirms students not in spite of their backgrounds, but because of them. Design and UX/UI students often remark that our discussion of Don Norman's The Design of Everyday Things—which we use to explore the affordances of verbal technologies—prepares them to engage more deeply with their major courses. CS students similarly value readings on the philosophy of coding: the DRY Principle (Don't Repeat Yourself) as a method for designing efficient papers, and orthogonality (independence of unrelated components) for structuring effective paragraphs.
I teach that poetry emphasizes structure and highly compressed language. Since compression is one of poetry's primary characteristics—it is, in a sense, communication condensed—it serves as a highly effective tool for teaching composition and efficiency. I have developed and offered twelve iterations of "Poetry for Programmers," which integrates formal poetics with the philosophy of computer science. From the first class we look at a poem by Pittsburgh poet Cameron Barnett where the stanzas begin with 1 or 0 in an apparently random order. In each section I have taught, one CS student suddenly realizes the sequence is ASCII binary for "I"—the very thing the speaker says he could only manage to write. The whole poem is a sort of code that produces the speaker's self as they read. After contextualizing with historical readings about the Jacquard loom and woven RAM on the Apollo module, I show students that computation is not just a method of analysis but, like meter, is a very human activity. This opening lesson demonstrates that knowledge of binary has interpretive importance in contemporary poetic compositions, and that complex decision-making is similarly the result of a long series of small binary decisions.
Combining technical skills with an interpretive mindset is essential to distinguish propaganda from promise and hallucinations from meaningful analysis in an increasingly AI-driven world. My research on the impact of Glyph Machina's output for Large Language Models builds curricula on ethical AI development and historical data bias—examining how data collection from historically thin or skewed corpora affects the accuracy of LLM output. My work involves a field-defining Handwritten Character Recognition (HCR) model, utilizing CNNs connected to LSTMs in PyTorch.
Mentoring
My courses have been named in campus tours as positively engaging students' chosen majors. A mechanical engineering student wrote: "I gained more from this course than I ever would have expected from a mandatory first year college course. The improvement I observed in my ability to effectively analyze and digest texts, especially poetry, was remarkable for such a short period of time." A statistics/machine learning major: "I spent 7 years in a creative writing program and I think I appreciate poetry more now than I ever did during that." Two students from "Poetry for Programmers" have had papers selected for publication by the undergraduate writing journal. I have mentored students who learned Unity to write video games engaging medieval literature, developed ML models to predict food shortages, and critically implemented AI tools in research projects.
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Courses
Poetry for Programmers
In this course, students will read ancient and modern poetry with at least three aims: 1. What stories do poems tell? 2. How do the formal features of the poems make them operate? 3. How can those features be modeled? Students will learn the history and operation of linguistic strategies like metaphor, rhyme, and alliteration. Readings may include selections from Pope, Walcott, Sappho, Robert Hayden, Marianne Moore, Homer, and investigations into contemporary working poets. We'll also apprehend some critical conversations of literary analysis: how race and poetics interact, how formal features shape thought, and how canonicity factors into form. We'll also look at the elements that coding shares with poetic language—from the existence of coding languages to terms like concatenation, compilation, for loops—to consider how studying the formal features of poetic composition can additionally inform human-computer interaction and how coding knowledge can inform and expand forms of poetic analysis.
Students will learn select critical theory and its application, write formal and argumentative essays. Opportunities to experiment with poetic composition, generative projects, and companion coding will abound as well.
Hunger: The Politics and Philosophy of Pangs
Is hunger a feeling? Is it a physical state? How much of our human activity is oriented around preventing hunger? How does hunger also reveal inequality? How do desire and appetite relate to hunger? Is hunger a positive state or a lack of food? We'll discuss how hunger plays an important role in our lives, in our communities, and how we can develop a coherent approach to questions of hunger and how developing such an approach can transform the way we interact with our goals, our communities, and even parts of ourselves. As early as the middle ages, poets divided society into 'winners,' i.e. producers and 'wasters,' i.e. consumers. In recent years, hunger provides a locus for social commentary in Tommy Pico's poetry and Roxane Gay's memoirs. And the problem is local, too: Pittsburgh has the highest levels of food insecurity among similarly-sized cities. Nearly 1 in 5 residents of Pittsburgh live in food insecurity – a much higher rate than national rates. In this 'foodie city' in one of the most stupendously wealthy countries in the world, why are people going hungry? In this course, students will begin to answer these questions through a variety of individual and collaborative research projects. Students will learn to analyze texts for their arguments, synthesize their ideas, and learn the skills needed to participate in a scholarly conversation. After reading and analyzing a variety of arguments on this issue, students will write a formal research proposal and paper by drawing upon their knowledge from this class and their own disciplines.
Erotic Ecologies II: Bent Gardens and Unnatural Nature
This course shifts the focus from "nature" as a site of generation to its perception as interference in human decision making, love, and happiness. Storms arise and magic abounds in Sir Orfeo, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest, and selections from Milton's Paradise Lost will cycle back to Genesis. We'll end by examining lost love and frustration in the natural world with selections from Wordsworth's Preludes, Byron's "Darkness," Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince, Jos Charles's Feeld, Tommy Pico's Feed, and Robin Wall Kimmerer's Gathering Moss.
We're in a strange position in relationship to nature these days – the median American farm is not economically self-sustaining, we have national parks pristinely preserved for the middle to upper classes and pollution on a massive scale in the places that we live. Lawn grass is our primary crop, we make it useless with pesticides, and foragers and gardeners are considered niche and kooky. Meanwhile, we have massive changes and ensuing disagreements worldwide about sexuality – what is 'natural,' what is 'good,' and what forms of human sexuality ought to be politically punished or protected. We're not even begin to solve these problems or even circumscribe them, but it's the setting in which we'll look at some of the oldest extant written stories, from medieval literature and philosophy, all of which are strongly attuned both to eros and to the natural world in which they live.
Erotic Ecologies I: Literary Gardens of Love
In this course, students will read the creation accounts from Gilgamesh, the Qur'an, Genesis, and Hesiod's Theogeny. From these accounts of clay to flesh, we'll turn to Ovid's mythologies of deified streams and rivers, their offspring, and how the marriage of the divine and the dirt yields human beings in the ancient world. In Genesis, the natural world provides temptations, and in Song of Songs, the fruit for erotic metaphor as it does for hundreds of years in the poems of Rumi and medieval English lyrics. The first semester will end in the Middle Ages, where a green warrior spawned, it seems, from the natural world itself provides terrifying ethical and sexual ambiguities in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
Medieval Dreams and Modern Insomnia
In this course, trans-historical accounts of sleeping from the ancient world to now and theories of dreaming will serve as the frame for the dream-visions of the Middle Ages and contemporary tales of insomnia, including Piers Plowman, Chaucer's The Nun's Priest's Tale, Pearl as well as Cashback, Taxi Driver, La science des rêves, After Dark, Fight Club, In Search of Lost Time, Sleep, Insomniac Dreams: Experiments with Time by Vladimir Nabokov, and many more. Do these stories have something in common? What do the dreams of the Middle Ages have to teach us about our own sleepless age? What can we do with the liminal space between waking and sleeping – is it a waste of life or a door to another world?
We'll split time in this course between medieval literature written in Old English and Middle English and films produced within the last few decades. All the works we'll study involve dreaming and/or not sleeping – I've paired them in part because these are two artistic (sub?)genres I find particularly interesting. More than that, I have wondered about the strange resonances between the late Middle Ages and postmodernity – we'll be together on the front lines of figuring whether that resonance is incidental or substantial. By the end of the course, I want you to have an initial sense of what medieval dream-visions are and are doing and a sense for the role of insomnia in those visions as well as the modern visions portrayed in films.
Writing and Community Engagement: The Lenses in Our Lives
Since Nero squinted through gems to watch gladiators die, artificial lenses have changed the way we see the world; 'the lens' is a common metaphor used to compare ideologies or to interpret art with a philosophy. This course will investigate how lenses came about and how the widespread presence of lenses (in cameras, the eye) started to shape the world around us. We'll consider the implications of privileging vision over hearing and touch; explore the strangeness of lenses, which distort in order to clarify; read ancient, medieval, and modern accounts of lens-making and use, fiction in which a lens or camera is particularly relevant, philosophy and theory which examines lenses, and study films and photographs with the insights gained along the way.
The Purpose of Education, or, What are we doing here?
Much is expected of you, college freshmen. Amidst the expectations for gaining future employment, appearing successful, and forming community, it can be easy to lose a sense of place. This class, in its humble way, is designed to provide some of that sense by answering two questions: "What is an intellectual life?" and "How does someone develop one?". Students who are willing to think seriously and earnestly are invited to participate; ideally, a wide variety of majors will attend. The focus of the class is on the arts: paintings, sculpture, literature, film, photography, and music will all be objects of engagement, with special emphasis on literature, essays, and film.
Games and Contests: Writing about Place and Motion
Athletic contests have served as symbols, stories, and structure for nearly as long as literature has been written down. From the Olympic champions Pindar set among the gods to the Aeneid's boat races to Henry V's tennis metaphor to David Foster Wallace's essays to the Psalms to the old baseball-loving pastor of Marilynne Robinson's Gilead and the broken bodies of B.H. Fairchild's Midwest outfielders, sports serve up striking images, memorable characters, and intensely emotional moments.
In this class, we'll read works entire and excerpted, literature, essays, and theory all focusing on athletes or analogies of sport. We'll ask questions about the relationship of athleticism and literature, those who write and those who play.
Advanced Strategies in Rhetoric and Research
As you may have noticed, this class is titled 'strategies in rhetoric and research' which accurately implies that we will be concerning ourselves closely with both rhetoric and research. Before we can have strategies at all, let alone advanced strategies, we'll need to find out what rhetoric and research are, what they involve, and how they are used in a variety of contexts. With this in mind, you will work in several media, several formats of those media, and choosing the best presentation for the rhetorical task at hand. What will this look like? You'll be blogging, writing, perhaps vlogging, and speaking, all before audiences and all focusing around a single area of concern.
Upon successful completion of this course, you will be able to demonstrate:
- The ability to analyze a rhetorical situation (audience, context, goal, etc.) and respond productively.
- The ability to explain and defend the decisions made while composing.
- A familiarity with a number of different composition methods including oral presentations, video production, and—of course—written papers.
- An understanding of a basic research methods, library and otherwise.
The goal of this class, briefly, is that you all take steps toward becoming eloquent human beings.
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Encryption Poem
Encrypt or decrypt text with a visual cipher inspired by encryptionpoem. Enter your text and a password.
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Poem Frankensteiner
Randomly reduce and lineate text into verse, inspired by poem-frankensteiner. Enter source text and choose how much to keep.
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Research Party
Drop a bibliography, compile citation and social maps, read coverage and synthesis, and ask questions over your corpus—in the browser. Source: research-party on GitHub.
Open research-party.com in a new tab if the embed is slow or blocked.
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Education
Cornell University Ithaca, NY
Ph.D., Medieval Literature 2022
Dissertation: "Rewrite this Book: Compilation and Experimental Literary Practices in Piers Plowman and Late Medieval English Book Culture"
M.A., Medieval Literature 2019
Saint Louis University St. Louis, MO
M.A., English 2016
Thesis: "Double Vision: Piers Plowman and the Medieval Miscellany"
Hillsdale College Hillsdale, MI
B.A., Classics and English Literature 2012
Academic Appointments
Proofs & Reasons May 2026 – Present
Researcher · Carnegie Mellon University
- Combines recent advances in natural language processing with CMU's growing leadership in digital humanities to provide the first window onto the long-timescale development of mathematical imagination and the ways calculational techniques hybridize with a broader spiritual and mystical imaginary. proofsandreasons.io
Carnegie Mellon University Aug 2023 – Present
Lecturer – Writing and Communications · Pittsburgh, PA
- Courses: 76-106 Poetry for Programmers (novel course design that unites philosophy of computer science and poetics); 76-101 Hunger: Interpretation and Argument (developing markdown files to aid student critical engagement with corporate AI tools); 76-270 Writing for the Professions
- Member, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Working Group
Cornell University Aug 2022 – May 2023
Joseph F. Martino '53 Lecturer in Undergraduate Teaching · Ithaca, NY
- Courses: Erotic Ecologies I & II; Medieval Dreams and Modern Insomnia
Cornell University Aug 2017 – Dec 2021
Instructor of Record · Ithaca, NY
- Courses: Writing and Community Engagement; American Voices; Games and Contests (Writing about Place/Motion); Collecting Evidence (Mystery Stories)
- Teaching Assistant: Medical Humanities (Spring 2019)
- President, Medieval Studies Graduate Organization; Graduate Policy and Liaison Committee Member
Saint Louis University Aug 2014 – May 2016
Instructor of Record · St. Louis, MO
- Course: Advanced Strategies in Rhetoric and Research
- Co-Founder: Text Mining Initiative, Walter J. Ong, S.J., Center for Digital Humanities
- EGSO Event Planner and Treasurer; EGSO Committee Member; Graduate Student Association Representative for English
Digital Humanities & Public Scholarship
Research Party 2025 – Present
Creator & Developer · Pittsburgh, PA
- Designed and launched Research Party, a digital humanities platform dedicated to revealing social networks and bias in bibliographies.
- Offers the possibility for expansion of bibliographies after analysis is complete.
- Live workspace: research-party.com · GitHub · embedded on this site
Carnegie Mellon University – Digital Humanities Lab 2025 – Present
Co-Founder · Pittsburgh, PA
- Establishing a working group for researchers in CMU's English department and beyond focused on practical digital and computational solutions to real research problems.
Carnegie Mellon University – Computational Humanities Research Group 2025 – Present
Department Coordinator · Pittsburgh, PA
- Coordinating events for CMU's English department in coordination with the Posner Center and CMU Libraries to give local digital humanities researchers a public platform.
Issuing Citations 2025 – Present
Chair and Co-Founder · Pittsburgh, PA
- Established and coordinated a meeting space for graduate students to present WIP to peers from other disciplines.
Glyph Machina 2023 – Present
Medievalist & Technical Liaison · Remote
- Updated an .xml visual editor and wrote software to expand Latin abbreviations automatically
- Transcribed manuscripts to .xml format and corrected transcriptions in VS Code
- Authored approved SBIR Pre-application documents and internal technical documentation
Public Works 2022 – 2023
Co-Founder · Ithaca, NY
- Co-founded and maintained an interdisciplinary lecture series aimed at connecting academic speakers with public audiences (www.publicworks.info)
Saint Louis University – Text Mining Initiative 2014 – 2016
Co-Founder · St. Louis, MO
- Co-founded a digital humanities working group aimed at genre identification through distant reading practices
Consulting
Gilliam Writers Group 2023 – Present
Faculty · New York, NY
- Consult with creative and academic writers to bring writing projects to completion and to market.
Publications & Creative Work
Academic Publications
- Zhang, Michael, Elise Wang, Charlotte Whatley, Seth Strickland, and Dylan Bannon (May 2026). "Democratizing the medieval English legal tradition." arXiv:2605.00977 [cs.CV]. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.00977
- "III Middle English: Langland" (May 2025). The Year's Work in English Studies 104.1.
- "Review of Elise Wang, The Making of Felony Procedure in Middle English Literature" (2025). Law and History Review.
- "III Middle English: Langland" (May 2024). The Year's Work in English Studies 103.1.
- "III Middle English: Langland" (July 2023). Year's Work in English Studies 102.1, pp. 171–263.
- "III Middle English: Langland" (July 2022). Year's Work in English Studies 101.1, pp. 185–282.
- "Review of Arvind Thomas, Piers Plowman and the Reinvention of Church Law in the Late Middle Ages" (2022). Recherche littéraire / Literary Research 38.1.
Creative Works
- "[My father didn't see the possum trundling]" (2024). The Pierian.
- "[Nothing Can Express it]" (May 2024). Stink Eye Magazine. Online
- "Goodbye, Mexico: Poems of Remembrance" (2020). Ed. Sarah Cortez. Texas A&M University Press. Chap. A Certain Lie about the Phoenix.
- "Imagination" (2015), "[When you know what it is to suffer]" (2012), "Garlic" (2012), "Orion" (2012). The Tower Light.
Invited Lectures (Selected)
The Beatrice Institute Aug 2024 – Aug 2025 · Pittsburgh, PA
- "Reflections on Lucian Simon's 'Schola' (1926)" Aug 2025
- "Romantic Poetry: The Theology of Blake's Poison Tree" Mar 2025
- "Piers Plowman and Questions of Justice" Feb 2025
- "Old English Poetry: Dream of the Rood" Jan 2025
- "Reflections on Robert Gwathmey's 'Hoeing'" Aug 2024
University of Pittsburgh Sept 2023 · Pittsburgh, PA
- "The manuscripts of Piers Plowman"
International Poetry Forum Nov 2024 · Pittsburgh, PA
- "Albertus Magnus as Guidance for Ethics and AI" (Poets-in-Person series)
Awards, Fellowships, and Grants
- Project & Proposals Award ($2000) — American Society for Legal History
- Provost's Inclusive Teaching Fellowship ($5000) — Carnegie Mellon University
- Centre for Medieval Literature Graduate Student Bursary — SDU / York
- Cornell University Conference Research Travel Grant — Cornell University
- Sage Fellowship — Cornell University
- Alan Young-Bryant Poetry Award — Cornell University
- Truman Capote PhD Writer's Award — Cornell University
- President's Fund Travel Grant — Cornell University
- Vatican Film Library Research Grant ($8000) — Saint Louis University
- Donald Howard Travel Scholarship — New Chaucer Society
- Saint Louis University Graduate Assistantship — Saint Louis University
- Alan F. Hilfiker Endowed Graduate Scholarship — Saint Louis University
- Newberry Renaissance Consortium Grant — Newberry Library
- University Writing Services Mentor of the Month — Saint Louis University
Conference Presentations
- Bannon, Dylan, Seth Strickland, Elise Wang, Charlotte Whatley, and Michael Zhang (2025). "Making the Law Legible: A Self-Correcting BERT-Like Transformer as Manuscript Transcription Aid." The 27th Conference of the Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities.
- "Divine Daughters in Law" (2025). 27th Conference of the Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities, Georgetown Law, Washington, D.C.
- "The Brazen Head of Vector Analysis: Robert Grosseteste and Albertus Magnus as Technological Forerunners" (2025). Twentieth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences | Minds and Machines.
- "Reviewed for Publication: Heidi Wright's Designing an Online Reading and Writing Course: Content, Caveats, and Accessibility" (2024). Symposium on Second Language Writing, Tucson, AZ. Nov 2024. Course overview
- "The Last Medieval Scribe: John Colyns and Authorial Control" (2023). Public Works · Ithaca, NY.
- "Playing Chicken with Fate: Fortunate Dreams of the Body in Chaucer's 'The Nun's Priest's Tale'" (2022). New Chaucer Society · Durham University.
- "Your Own Personal Archive: Piers Plowman and Innovations of Abstraction" (2022). Centre for Medieval Literature · The Danish Institute, Rome.
- "'Speke, Parrot': Echoes of Romance in Harley 2252" (2019). Leeds International Medieval Congress · University of Leeds.
- "Death in Unity: Skepticism, Wounds, and Epistemic Crises in Piers Plowman B.20" (2019). 7th International Piers Plowman Society Meeting · University of Miami.
- "Peace at Peace: Scales of Redemption in Piers Plowman" (2018). New Chaucer Society Biennial Congress · University of Toronto.
- "Incest and the Grammar of the Gloss: Productive Omission in Pericles and Confessio Amantis" (2016). IV International Congress of the John Gower Society. Apollonius and Pericles: Manuscripts, Rhetoric, Performance, and Desire · Durham University.
- "Roundtable: Doing DH: Opportunities and Challenges for Graduate Students in the Digital Humanities" (2016). With Helen Davies, Margaret Smith. 4th Annual Symposium on Medieval and Renaissance Studies · Saint Louis University.
- "Which Time Is It? Digital Queries and Early Modern Period Schemes" (2016). Co-written with Jonathan Sawday, Lauren Kersey, Geoffrey Brewer. The Walter J. Ong Symposium on Digital Humanities · Saint Louis University.
Service & Organization
- Organizer: 7th International Piers Plowman Society (Miami, FL); TMI Inaugural Conference (St. Louis).
- Panel organizer: Activism I & II (IPPS); Slaughterhouse Vibes (SLU Symposium).
- Session chair: Futures of Tradition (Cornell); Activism II (IPPS); Chaucerian Narratives (Illinois Medieval Association).
Skills & Languages
Research Languages
- Professional/Advanced: Latin, Middle English, Old English
- Intermediate/Reading: French (B1), Old Norse, German
- Basic: Spanish, Italian, Old French, Attic Greek
Technical Skills
- Languages/Formats: Python, Julia, HTML5, LaTeX, XML/TEI
- Tools: VS Code, Text Mining (Stylometry), Linux