James Dobson

James E. Dobson is an Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College, where he serves as Director of the Writing Program and was appointed Special Advisor to the Provost for AI from 2024 to 2025. He earned a Ph.D. in English with a minor in Literary Theory from Indiana University Bloomington in 2014, an A.M. in the Program in the Humanities from the University of Chicago in 2008, and a B.A. in English cum laude from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2007. Dobson's career at Dartmouth spans over two decades, beginning as a data scientist in the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience from 2003 to 2019, followed by roles including Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, Assistant Professor since 2020, and Director of the Institute for Writing and Rhetoric from 2020 to 2023. He has also served as Program Manager and Administrator for the Futures of American Studies Institute.

Dobson's scholarship centers on intellectual history, U.S. autobiographical writing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and computational approaches including digital humanities, machine learning, computer vision, and text mining. His books include Modernity and Autobiography in Nineteenth-Century America: Literary Representations of Communication and Transportation Technologies (Palgrave, 2017), Critical Digital Humanities: The Search for a Methodology (University of Illinois Press, 2019), Moonbit co-authored with Rena J. Mosteirin (punctum books, 2019), The Birth of Computer Vision (University of Minnesota Press, 2023), and Perceptron co-authored with Rena J. Mosteirin (punctum books, 2025). Notable articles feature 'Vector Hermeneutics: On the Interpretation of Vector Space Models of Text' (Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 2022), 'On Reading and Interpreting Black Box Deep Neural Networks' (International Journal of Digital Humanities, 2023), 'Objective Vision: Confusing the Subject of Computer Vision' (Social Text, 2023), and 'Early Machine Learning and Artificial Animal Intelligences' (Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, 2024). He has received the Dean of the Faculty Teaching Award in 2019 and the Russell Ladd Newcomb 1926 Fellowship for 2024-2025, along with grants from the Leslie Center for the Humanities and federal agencies. Dobson holds editorial positions on the boards of Resources for American Literary Studies and the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, and serves on committees including the Faculty Leadership Group on Artificial Intelligence, Committee of Chairs, and Council for Interdisciplinary Programs. His interdisciplinary work bridges literature and technology, shaping discourse in digital humanities and AI.

Professional Email: James.E.Dobson@dartmouth.edu