The Risks and Rewards of Implementing Digital Humanities Methodologies in Modern Language Graduate Research

Most digital humanities programs and centers, as well as the scholars that populate them, tend to be housed in or linked to English or History departments. As a result, graduate students outside of these disciplines with an interest in the digital humanities must work within existing institutional structures and constraints to acquire the necessary training and methodological grounding that they need for their research. With these limitations in mind, in this paper I consider what it means to implement digital humanities approaches into graduate research in the variety of Modern Language departments that exist in the United States. More specifically, I address both the inherent risks and the potential rewards of such interventions. As a way of concluding, I discuss the unique affordances that emerge from encouraging the study of the digital humanities in Modern Language departments.