Matthew Wilkens

Matthew Wilkens is an associate professor of information science. He uses quantitative and computational methods to study large-scale developments in literary and cultural history. His work has focused in particular on literary text mining, geolocation extraction, genre detection, and the cross-pollination of critical and social scientific methods. He also seeks to develop and apply natural language processing and artificial intelligence methods to large-scale datasets in domains including medicine, public health, economics, and the law.

Wilkens is the director of the AI for Humanists project and the Textual Geographies project, as well as a co-investigator of the AI for Cultural and Historical Reasoning and Text Mining the Novel projects. He is a founding editorial board member of the Journal of Cultural Analytics, and the author of Gender and Literary Geography (with Elizabeth Evans) and of Revolution: The Event in Postwar Fiction.

Prior to arriving at Cornell, Wilkens taught at the University of Notre Dame, where he was the Ruth and Paul Idzik Associate Professor in Digital Scholarship, and at Wayne State University. He received his Ph.D. in literature from Duke University, master's degrees in English from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and in physical chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, and a bachelor's degree in chemistry and philosophy from the College of William and Mary.