This post is part of the Meet the ETCL Team series, which introduces the wonderful people who work in the lab and who have worked with us in the past.
Laura Estill joined the lab as a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow from 2011–2013, working on DEx: A Database of Dramatic Extracts. The DEx project grew out of Laura’s dissertation research, a traditional Renaissance studies project with a lot of data, although she didn’t think of it as data at the time. Laura is currently working with Luis Meneses on a rebuild of DEx to ensure its longevity.
In addition to creating the database, Laura coordinated the lab’s Nuts & Bolts series and was involved in organizing the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI). Laura first heard about the lab when she attended DHSI 2011, and has attended regularly since then as an instructor and as a student.
After completing her postdoc in 2013, Laura was an Assistant Professor of English at Texas A&M University. She is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of English and Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Digital Humanities and New Media at St. Francis Xavier University (StFX).
At StFX, Laura is developing DHSI-East to bring DH training and community to Atlantic Canada, and was recently awarded a Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) grant to establish the StFX Digital Humanities Research Centre. She is also an editor of the World Shakespeare Bibliography, which presents information about Shakespearean scholarship, productions, and texts from 1960 to the present, with annotations.
Laura remembers the lab as the place where she became a digital humanist, and her experience collaborating with other team members—including Constance Crompton, Aaron Mauro, Alyssa McLeod, Alyssa Arbuckle, Matt Huculak, and Daniel Powell—has shaped her work ever since.
In fact, Laura coined the lab’s unofficial motto, “We put the ‘lab’ in collaboration,” which she wrote on a whiteboard about six years ago that still hangs on the wall of the lab.
When she’s not at work, Laura enjoys taking her family and dogs for walks, visiting the beach, and working on jigsaw puzzles, particularly Cobble Hill’s Star Trek series.