Project Leads
Inger S. Brodey
Inger is a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and has published extensively on Jane Austen and the history of the novel. She serves as president of the Jane Austen Collaborative Board and co-founder of the Jane Austen Summer Program (JASP) and the Jane Austen & Co. web series. She is Principal Investigator for our National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Projects for the Public grant and Co-Creator of Jane Austen’s Desk. Her book, Jane Austen and the Price of Happiness (Johns Hopkins, 2024) has been reviewed in Wall Street Journal, New Yorker, Sunday Times (London), Publishers Weekly, and elsewhere. An A-Z Guide to Jane Austen’s World is forthcoming in 2026. Read more about Inger.
Sarah Schaefer Walton
Sarah is an Assistant Professor of English and the Director of Digital Humanities at Marshall University. She has been a part of the Jane Austen Collaborative since 2014. She served as a Director of the Jane Austen Summer Program (JASP) from 2019-2025 and is the Project Manager and Co-Creator of Jane Austen’s Desk. Read more about Sarah.
Harriet Wu
Harriet is the owner and designer of Luma Design, providing graphic design services for small businesses and nonprofit organizations. Wu has designed logos and graphics for the Jane Austen Summer Program and is the principal illustrator for Jane Austen's Desk. Read more about Harriet.
Humanities Team
Janine Barchas
Janine is the Louann and Larry Temple Centennial Professor in English Literature at the University of Texas, Austin. In addition to authoring multiple books on Austen, she co-curated the “Will and Jane” exhibit at the Folger Museum. She also created What Jane Saw , which offers digital reconstructions of two museum events attended by Jane Austen. Barchas is also a former president of the North American Friends of Chawton House (NAFCH).
Katie Childs
Katie is Chief Executive of Chawton House, the former home of Jane Austen's brother Edward Austen-Knight—a house that Austen knew and loved, and which is now home to a world-class library of early women's writing. Katie has worked tirelessly to evolve Chawton House into an inspiring and sustainable historic estate that tells the story of the Knight family and brings early women's writing to life.
Lizzie Dunford
Lizzie is the Director of Jane Austen's House, the home of the globally beloved author and the birthplace of all six of her era-defining and influential novels. A trained conservator and experienced museum leader, Lizzie has worked in the museums and heritage sector for over 15 years, with a focus on house museums.
Caitlin Donovan
Caitlin is assistant director of Duke University's Master of Arts in Teaching Program. Her research interests center on critical digital literacy, teacher preparation, writing communities, and memes. She is a National Board-Certified educator, formerly teaching middle and high school in North Carolina, where her content areas spanned English/Language Arts, social studies, and creative writing. Caitlin is co-chair of the Jane Austen Summer Program's enrichment programming for educators and consults on educational content for Jane Austen's Desk.
Susan Allen Ford
Susan is Professor of English Emerita, Delta State University, and has been editor of Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal and Persuasions On-Line since 2006. She has also faithfully attended and contributed to the Jane Austen Summer Program (JASP) since its founding. She is JASP's context corner coordinator and a member of the Board of Directors of the Jane Austen Collaborative. Her book What Jane Austen's Characters Read (and Why) is forthcoming with Bloomsbury Academic Press in June 2024.
Sheila Johnson Kindred
Award-winning author Sheila brings the naval world of Jane Austen to life through her meticulously researched and vivid writing. Her Jane Austen's Transatlantic Sister: The Life and Letters of Fanny Palmer Austen (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2017) is a revealing account of a naval officer's young wife, her life during the Napoleonic wars, and her influence on Jane Austen's fiction. Sheila consults on the naval aspects of Jane Austen's Desk.
Laura Klein
Laura Klein, pianist and musicologist, holds two performance degrees and serves on faculty at Colorado Christian University. Since founding The Jane Austen Playlist in 2018, a multi-faceted project that researches the music of the Austen family, Klein’s work has garnered international attention in performance practices and domestic music-making in Britain’s long 18th century. More about her work, including links to recordings, publications, and upcoming events, can be found at www.laurakleinpiano.com.
Devoney Looser
Devoney is Professor of English at Arizona State University. She is the author or editor of nine books on literature by women, a Guggenheim Fellow, and an NEH Public Scholar. Her recent book The Making of Jane Austen (Johns Hopkins UP, 2017), was named 'Best Summer Book' (nonfiction, 2017) by Publisher's Weekly and won an Inside Higher Education Reader's Choice Award (2017). Known also for her public facing-work, Looser has published essays in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Salon, Slate, and the Times Literary Supplement.
Technical Team
Erica Freed
Erica is the Business Librarian at Miami University Libraries, supporting research and instruction for the Farmer School of Business. She previously worked in academic, corporate, public, and archival libraries across Georgia, Ohio, and North Carolina, including at UNC's Kenan-Flagler Business School. A graduate of the University of South Carolina and UNC–Chapel Hill's School of Information and Library Science, she is committed to accessible digital scholarship and thoughtful information design. She has been the database developer and manager for Jane Austen's Desk since 2022.
Firestream Media
FireStream Media, owned by Carol Thomson, has been building websites and web applications since 2006. Carol and Emily Gillcoat are the co-developers for Jane Austen's Desk. Carol is also the project manager. Carol and Emily have worked together for over 15 years building custom database applications. FireStream is located in downtown Durham, NC. Read more about FireStream.
Diane Jakacki
Diane is the Digital Scholarship Coordinator and Associate Faculty in Comparative & Digital Humanities at Bucknell University. She is the lead researcher for the REED London project, principal investigator of the Mellon Foundation funded LAB Cooperative project and partner with the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory (CWRC) in developing the Linked Editorial Academic Framework (LEAF) virtual research environment. Diane is also Chair of the TEI Board of Directors.
Laura Mandell
Laura is Professor of English at Texas A&M University where she founded, and for 12 years directed, the Center of Digital Humanities Research. She is Project Director of the Poetess Archive, Acquisitions Editor of 18thConnect, and Director of ARC, the Advanced Research Consortium overseeing NINES, 18thConnect, and MESA. She spearheaded the Early Modern OCR project, a project concerned with improving OCR for early modern and 18th-c. texts. Dr. Mandell's digital projects include the Digital New Variorum Shakespeare, TypeWright, and the Big Data Infrastructure Visualization Application.
Susan Brown
Susan's major areas of expertise are digital humanities and critical infrastructure studies, Victorian writing and women's writing, and feminist theory. She holds a Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) in Collaborative Digital Scholarship which sponsors The Humanities Interdisciplinary Collaboration Lab (THINC Lab), home to DH@Guelph and the IF (Intersectional Feminism/Interdisciplinary Feminism) series. Her digital humanities research center originates one of the longest-running digital humanities projects—the Orlando Project, which published its flagship literary historical textbase online with Cambridge University Press in 2006.
Arianne Hartsell-Gundy
Arianne is the library liaison for the English Department and Literature Program at Duke University. She also collects for New and Noteworthy and Overdrive. She is currently serving as the 1G Student Success Librarian, a role that aims to provide support for first-generation college students at Duke. She was previously a Humanities Librarian at Miami University in Ohio, and an Instruction Librarian at Florida State University. She has an MLS/MA in Comparative Literature from Indiana University, and a BA in English from the University of Missouri-Columbia.