December 29 Guests

Dave Shepard
As a native Davisite, UC Davis has been central to David Shepard’s life—he worked at UC Davis during and after college at Notre Dame, before heading off to graduate school at UCLA. He is currently in the sixth (and hopefully final!) year of UCLA’s doctoral program in English, working on a dissertation that traces the impact of humanities computing on American literature. He is an active member of the UCLA digital humanities community: currently, he is the technical lead on HyperCities (http://hypercities.com/), a digital humanities project for historical mapping, and he founded and heads the UCLA Digital Humanities Reading Group. With co-PIs Professors Todd Presner and Chris Johanson, he received one of the inaugural Google Digital Humanities grants to develop an extension to HyperCities called “Geoscribe.” He currently resides in LA with his wife, Valerie, who already has her PhD.

Valerie Shepard
Valerie Shepard is a native of Chico, CA, and a UC Davis alumna (English, 2001). She graduated from UCLA in June 2010 with her PhD in English, and earned a departmental teaching award in 2007. She specializes in Renaissance literature and Milton; currently, she is revising portions of her dissertation, Reading the Cosmos in Milton’s Paradise Lost, for publication. She has presented her work at several conferences, including the Young Milton conference in 2008 at Oxford, and she will be reading papers at both the Renaissance Society of America’s conference in March 2011 in Montreal, Canada, and at the tenth annual International Milton Symposium in Tokyo, Japan in August 2011. She also works as a student affairs officer at UCLA’s Scholarship Resource Center (www.scholarshipcenter.ucla.edu <http://www.scholarshipcenter.ucla.edu> ), helping students from all backgrounds and countries find and apply for scholarships and fellowships. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband David and is cheering him on as he finishes his PhD.