Amanda standing in front of a building wearing a black dress. There are multicolored hexagons on the ground.

Amanda Licastro (she/her) is the Digital Scholarship Librarian at Swarthmore College, the pedagogical director of the Book Traces project, and is an Andrew W. Mellon Senior Fellow in Critical Bibliography. Her research explores the intersection of technology and writing, including book history, dystopian literature, and digital humanities. Composition and Big Data, her collection co-edited with Ben Miller, was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in September 2021, and you can find her work in journals such as Reviews in DH, Communication Design Quarterly, Hybrid Pedagogy and Kairos, as well as collections such as Critical Digital Pedagogy and Digital Reading and Writing in Composition Studies.

Amanda serves on the editorial collective of the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy and is the Chair of the Committee on Digital Humanities for the Modern Language Association.  Amanda was formerly the Assistant Professor of Digital Rhetoric in the English Department at Stevenson University in Maryland, where she taught courses in multimodal composition, digital publishing, and grant writing. The grant-funded project on integrating Virtual Reality across the curriculum that Amanda developed and executed at Stevenson was awarded the Paul Fortier Prize at the 2017 Digital Humanities conference, and has been featured in the Baltimore Sun and Baltimore Magazine

Amanda has also earned distinguished teaching awards from Stevenson University and CUNY for teaching with innovative technology. At the Graduate Center, CUNY, Amanda completed a doctorate degree in English with a certificate in Interactive Technology and Pedagogy. In 2016, her dissertation, “Excavating ePortfolios: What Student-Driven Data Reveals about Multimodal Composition and Instruction,” won the Calder Award in Digital Humanities.  The Writing Studies Tree, an a digital academic genealogy project, co-founded by Amanda along with her collaborators Ben Miller and Jill Belli, earned the prestigious Kairos award for service to the computers and writing community.

Amanda previously taught as an instructor at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, Marywood University, Wilkes University, and King’s College. During her time as a doctoral student as the Graduate Center, CUNY, she was a graduate teaching fellow at BMCC and an Instructional Technology Fellow through the Macaulay Honors College. At the Graduate Center, Amanda was the co-director of the CUNY Digital Humanities Initiative and the co-chair of the GC Composition & Rhetoric Group.

Follow Amanda on social media @amandalicastro.

Save