A fellow writer's account of Claire Keegan's fiction retreat in rural Ireland, where I spent a week this summer.
Maundy Mitchell, August 2026
I work at the seam where the humanities meet the technologies now remaking how we research, write, and know.
Much of my work is in designing research ecosystems for novice historians, building the communities of inquiry and the blend of artisanal craft and emerging literacies through which young scholars learn to author their own thinking rather than outsource it. I also guide institutions through the shifts AI is forcing on teaching and research, helping them surface the hidden assumptions in how they frame writing and inquiry, and design for the productive friction that real understanding requires.
I teach Modern European History, ethics, and epistemology, and I designed the course Digital Culture & Modern Power. I conceived and co-lead STAIR, a study of how students experience learning and authorship in the age of AI, and I work with faculty and organizations, including JSTOR, on what research should look like now. My research has taken me from the Vatican Apostolic Library to the railway archives of Ireland. Earlier in my career I coauthored research on the digital divide at the Pew Internet & American Life Project, and I hold an M.A. with honors in Communication, Culture & Technology from Georgetown, where I studied under Randy Bass at the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship.
The capacity for what we can know has been amplified beyond measure. How we come to know, and how we come to know ourselves in the process, has not. It remains slow, embodied, unforceable.
That question is the cornerstone of the next pillar of knowing, the one our moment must build as surely as earlier ages built their libraries and their halls. I am among those building it.
The book
I am at work on a book of literary history recovering my grandmother and father's history in twentieth-century Ireland and England, and the interlocking systems that nearly erased them.
Selected writing and public work
This Writer Walked into a Pub
Exploring Research and AI with JSTOR
Kevin Guthrie, founding president of ITHAKA and JSTOR, and Michael Vath joined my department as visiting scholars for a day on research, inquiry, and what responsible use of AI asks of students.
Greens Farms Academy, May 2026
Visiting Research Professor Speaks with STAIR
Mary Madden led our student researchers through qualitative method: interview design, self-reflexivity, and how to move from a large question to a credible research plan.
Greens Farms Academy, February 2026
On Inquiry, Italy, and the Future of Knowing
From the Sistine Hall of the Vatican Apostolic Library to the workshops of Italian artisans, in pursuit of what the humanities become after AI.
Greens Farms Academy, 2025
A Week of Inquiry: The 2025 AI Summer Institute
A cross-divisional faculty program I co-led, on building outward from core strengths while holding to the integrity of data, pedagogy, and authorship.
Greens Farms Academy, 2025
On the human element as the driving algorithm
On why the most durable learning keeps the human relationship at its center.
Global Online Academy