The English Department is happy to welcome our new colleague Helen Davies to UNC Charlotte

The UNC Charlotte English Department is very happy to announce the recent appointment of Dr. Helen Davies as a tenure-line Assistant Professor here in the Department of English with a joint appointment in the School of Data Science. Dr. Davies’s scholarly work is situated at the intersection of digital humanities, medieval literature, and manuscript studies. She is dedicated to applying cutting-edge technologies, such as multispectral imaging (MSI) and artificial intelligence (AI), to recover obscured, lost, or damaged historical texts and artifacts. A central focus of Dr. Davies’ research is the damaged thirteenth-century Vercelli Mappa Mundi. Since 2015, she has worked to digitally recover, transcribe, and translate the map, which led to the coauthored open-access digital critical edition “Vercelli Mappa Mundi” (2023). As part of this work, she led a new all-women multispectral imaging project in 2022 to gather updated information on related manuscripts in Vercelli. Her current book project, Mapping the Medieval: Charting the Unknown, Discovering the Unseen, and Recovering the Illegible Medieval Maps, uses a digital humanities framework to interpret the medieval worldview depicted in this map. Dr. Davies is also actively engaged in developing accessible technology for cultural heritage recovery. She has pioneered research using a low-cost, accessible MSI system designed by the Rochester Institute of Technology, moving beyond the high-end boutique MSI systems on which she was trained. This work includes writing Python code and experimenting with alternative cameras to minimize the technical expertise required to recover lost texts.

Before coming to UNC Charlotte this past August, Dr. Davies was an Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities in the Department of English and the Co-Director of the Center for Research Frontiers in the Digital Humanities at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs (UCCS). Her extensive educational background includes a Ph.D. in English from the University of Rochester. Prior to her doctoral work, she earned an M.A. in Digital Humanities from Loyola University Chicago (2013) and an M.A. in Medieval Studies from the University of York (2011), graduating with Distinction in Paleography. She also graduated cum laude with a B.A. in History and Classical Civilizations from Loyola University Chicago in 2009. Dr. Davies is the cofounder and Director of the Videntes Project (2022–Present), a digital humanities and cultural heritage recovery project. She is proficient in multiple languages, including Latin, Old Norse, Old English, Italian, and French.

As a teacher, she designed numerous courses while at UCCS, regularly teaching courses such as “Multispectral Imaging and Book History,” “Literary Mapping,” and “Digital Humanities Project Management.” Her teaching philosophy emphasizes connecting digital techniques and methodologies directly to humanistic inquiry and primary text analysis. She also advocates for curriculum redesign in light of emerging technologies like AI, arguing that educators should prepare students for the technology that will be ubiquitous in the workplace. If you are interested in learning more about Dr. Davies’s research, you should check out the following interviews with her available on YouTube and Spotify respectively: Medieval Maps and Manuscripts (with Dr. Helen Davies) and Multispectral Imaging.