Christopher Jimenez

Christopher Demers Jimenez, Ph.D., serves as the AI & Machine Learning Developer at the Penn Libraries. Working in coordination with the Research Data & Digital Scholarship (RDDS) team, he designs software, tools, and services that foster experimentation with and scholarly use of artificial intelligence at Penn. Drawing on formal interdisciplinary training in literary studies, the digital humanities, and computer science, he specializes in helping scholars adapt and apply computational methods for research projects in their respective disciplines.

Before joining the Penn Libraries, Chris was Associate Professor of English at Stetson University, where he taught courses on global and postcolonial literature, literary theory, and the digital humanities. His literary research examines the discourse of catastrophe in contemporary Anglophone literature, while his current work explores how text encoding practices have shaped and continue to shape the evolution of machine intelligence. His work has appeared in Comparative Literature Studies, TextGenEd, and The Pulter Project and is soon to appear in Cultures of Scale: Disciplines, Data, and Labor, a forthcoming volume in the Debates in the Digital Humanities series.

Chris earned his Ph.D. in English from Penn in 2017 under the direction of James F. English. He is presently completing an M.S. in Computer Science with a specialization in Artificial Intelligence at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he contributes to the Design Intelligence Lab under the direction of Ashok Goel. During his doctoral studies at Penn, he was a Fontaine Fellow, an inaugural Andrew W. Mellon Doctoral Fellow at the Price Lab for Digital Humanities, and a recipient of a Penfield Dissertation Research Fellowship.