Christopher Warren

Professor of English and Associate Department Head with a Courtesy Appointment in History

Area of Study

Humanities Analytics, Literary and Cultural Studies, Pre-Modern Studies

Bio

Active in humanities advocacy through the National Humanities Alliance, Christopher Warren is inspired by real-world humanities problems, such as funding for humanities research and access to books and archives. His research spans digital humanities, law and literature, political theory, early modern literature, print culture, and the history of political thought.

Warren's current research project focuses on "Freedom and the Press before Freedom of the Press," using machine learning and artificial intelligence to discover and center the anonymous craftsmen and -women responsible for printing controversial clandestine materials.

Warren is the author of Literature and the Law of Nations, 1580-1680 (Oxford University Press, 2015), which was awarded the 2016 Roland H. Bainton Prize for Literature. He is a member of the MLA's executive committee for 17th-Century English, and his articles have appeared in journals including Humanity, Law, Culture, and the Humanities, The European Journal of International Law, English Literary Renaissance, and Digital Humanities Quarterly. He is co-founder of the digital humanities project Six Degrees of Francis Bacon, and a founding member of CMU's Center for Print, Networks, and Performance (CPNP). Warren also directs CMU's minor in Humanities Analytics (HumAn) and is co-convenor of the Digital Humanities Faculty Research Group.

His previous posts have included teaching positions and research fellowships at Oxford University, University College London's Centre for Editing Lives and Letters, NUI-Galway's Moore Institute, and the University of Chicago.​

Warren welcomes inquires about CMU's distinctive HumAn program and applications from potential graduate students interested in early modern studies, digital humanities, print culture, literature and political thought, and law and literature.

Education

BA in English, Dartmouth College, 1999
MA in English, Georgetown University, 2003
DPhil English, Oxford University, 2008

Publications

• “Who Rpinted Shakespeare’s Fourth Folio?” with Samuel V. Lemley, DJ Schuldt, Elizabeth Dieterich, Laura S DeLuca, Max G’Sell, Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick, Kari Thomas, Kartik Goyal, and Nikolai Vogler. Shakespeare Quarterly 74, no. 2 (June 9, 2023): 139–46.


• “Angels and Diplomats: A Pleromatic Paradigm for Human Rights”, University of Pittsburgh Law Review 82.2 (2021).
• “Canst Thou Draw Out Leviathan with Computational Bibliography? New Angles on Printing Thomas Hobbes’ ‘Ornaments’ Edition,” with Samuel V. Lemley, Max G’Sell, Avery Wiscomb and Pierce Williams, Eighteenth-Century Studies 50.4 (2021).
• “International Lives and National Biographies: The ODNB and the World” Carnegie Mellon University, 2020.
• “Leviathan and the Airway: Black Lives Matter and Hobbes with the History Put Back.” The Sundial, June 26, 2020.
• “Damaged Type and Areopagitica’s Clandestine Printers,” with Pierce Williams, Shruti Rijhwani, Max G’Sell, Milton Studies, 62.1 (Spring 2020).
• “A Probabilistic Generative Model for Typographical Analysis of Early Modern Printing,” with Kartik Goyal, Chris Dyer, Max G’Sell, and Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick. ArXiv:2005.01646 [CS], May 4, 2020
• “Historiography’s Two Voices: Data Infrastructure and History at Scale in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB).” Journal of Cultural Analytics. November 2018.
• “History, Literature, and Authority in International Law.” The Oxford Handbook to Law and the Humanities. Eds. Maksymilian Del Mar, Bernadette Meyler, and Simon Stern. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.
• “Network Visualisations Show What We Can and What We May Know.” Aeon Magazine. June 18, 2018.
• “Exploring and Analyzing Network Data with Python.” Programming Historian, August 23, 2017. With John Ladd, Jessica Otis, and Scott Weingart.
• “Henry V, Anachronism, and the History of International Law.” The Oxford Handbook to English Law and Literature, 1500–1700. Ed. Lorna Hutson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.
• “To Ruin the Repairs: Milton, Allegory, Transitional Justice.” Law, Culture and the Humanities, 15.3 (2019). doi:10.1177/1743872116665341.
• “Six Degrees of Francis Bacon: A Statistical Method for Reconstructing Large Historical Social Networks,” with Daniel Shore, Jessica Otis, Lawrence Wang, Mike Finegold and Cosma Shalizi, Digital Humanities Quarterly, 10.3 (July 2016).
• “Towards Interoperable Network Ontologies for the Digital Humanities,” with Alison Langmead, Jessica Otis, Lisa Zilinski, and Scott Weingart, International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing, special issue edited by Mia Ridge and Jennifer Guiliano 10.1 (March 2016): 22-35.
• Literature and the Law of Nations, 1580-1680. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
• “John Milton and the Epochs of International Law,” European Journal of International Law 24 (2013). 557-581.
• “Gentili, the Poets, and the Laws of War.” The Roman Foundations of the Law of Nations: Alberico Gentili and the Justice of Empire, eds. Benedict Kingsbury and Benjamin Straumann (Oxford: OUP, 2011). 146-162.
• “O Brave New World: Shakespeare's 'The Tempest' turns 400 tomorrow,” Op-Ed, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 31 Oct. 2011.
• “Hobbes’ Thucydides and the Colonial Law of Nations,” The Seventeenth Century, 24.2, October 2009. 260-286.
• “Samson and the Chorus of Dissent.” Uncircumscribed Mind: Reading Milton Deeply, Eds. Kristin A. Pruitt and Charles W. Durham. Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 2008. 276-291.
• “When Self-Preservation Bids: Approaching Milton, Hobbes, and Dissent,” English Literary Renaissance, 37.1, Winter 2007. 118-150.
• “Thomas Hobbes,” in Blackwell Encyclopedia of English Renaissance Literature. Gen. Eds. Garrett Sullivan and Alan Stewart, Asst. Eds., Rebecca Lemon, Nicholas McDowell and Jennifer Richards.

Selected Undergraduate and Graduate Course Titles

Data Stories 
Law, Culture, and the Humanities
Introduction to Digital Humanities 
The Global Renaissance
John Milton: Poetry, Paradise, and Revolution
Shakespeare (Comedies and Romances, Shakespeare's Dark Plays)
Angels and Diplomats: Renaissance Poetry from Wyatt to Milton