Oxford MML alumna Dr Kelsey Rubin-Detlev has been awarded a Level II Digital Humanities Advancement Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to build new digital infrastructure to expand and enhance CatCor: The Digital Correspondence of Catherine the Great. Co-led by Rubin-Detlev and Professor Andrew Kahn, the CatCor project began in Oxford in 2013 with funding from Oxford’s John Fell Fund, the British Academy/Leverhulme Trust, and Oxford’s Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages. It aims to unite in a single database the letters of Empress Catherine the Great of Russia (1762-1796), whose extensive, multilingual correspondence presents unique challenges and opportunities for digital research. The NEH grant will allow CatCor to develop new solutions for coding, editing, and machine-translating Catherine’s texts, which are written in an idiosyncratic mix of early modern, non-standard versions of French, Russian, and German. By mapping the exceptionally broad range of people, places, and events discussed in the letters and constructing a new analysis platform to explore them, this phase of the project will also generate a knowledge graph of Catherine’s world, thereby enriching our understanding of Russian imperial history and the global Enlightenment.

Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this project do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.