meet the team
Director of mpark: Dr. Margaret Kilcline (Konkol) As a dedicated digital humanist and scholar, Dr. Kilcline has been instrumental in shaping mpark’s mission and initiatives. Her work, which focuses on the intersection of social and environmental issues related to technology, has inspired projects and collaborations within mpark. She is the co-editor of Modernism in the Green: Public Greens in Modern Literature and Culture. Her work can be found in Hybrid Pedagogy, Paideuma, Modernism/Modernity, Feminist Modernist Studies, Textus, and elsewhere. For her, the language around technology is not just about the latest bell and whistle, it is social action – for good or for ill – that helps configure humans in time and space. Currently, Dr. Margaret Kilcline (Konkol) is on leave for the Spring 2025 semester.
Interim director of mpark: Dr. Ola Swatek is a writing studies researcher who is passionate about the interactions between digital humanities and social science research. Her international collaborations focus on the question of how technology can make learning more accessible and equitable, without overlooking the exclusionary nature of technological access. Her research has appeared in Writing Analytics, System, L2 Journal, and World Englishes. At ODU, she teaches courses in the professional writing and general education programs. As the interim director of mpark, she hopes to engage undergraduate and graduate students in workshops on visualizing language and data, and continue on the mission set by Dr. Kilcline (Konkol).
Graduate assistant: Xianzhong Meng is a first-year PhD student in the Department of English at Old Dominion University. His academic interests include sociolinguistics, corpus-based discourse analysis, and various subfields of English studies. As the mpark Graduate Assistant for the fall semester, his work focuses on exploring digital humanities methods, including 3D printing, laser cutting, sewing machines, and retro technology.
mpark fellow: Bridget Dolan is a PhD student at Old Dominion University, studying Creative Writing as well as Literature and Cultural Studies. She received her MFA in poetry in 2024, and she has published one full-length collection of poems, Dust to Dust. In the English Department, she has worked as a GTA teaching both 110 and 211, and she currently serves as the Internship Coordinator. Bridget has practiced making for over twenty years, from the time her mother first taught her to crochet; her expertise lies in fiber arts and chapbook making.
mpark fellow: Elena Knudsen is a MFA student and aspiring novelist with a focus on fantasy, horror, and speculative fiction. She is interested in combining her love for creative work with her computer science background and is passionate about making software more accessible to the humanities.
past team members
Christopher Giofreda is a doctoral student at ODU who is interested in rhetoric, dialectic, and logic. He believes that a digital humanities maker space has a poetic sensibility in that users can render abstract concepts through the particulars they produce.
Elena Knudsen is an MFA student, writer of fantasy, and computer scientist. She is working on a series of videos for mpark’s online offerings that will help make coding more accessible for the humanities.
Lamaya Williams is a PhD student at Old Dominion University studying Literary and Cultural Studies and Rhetoric, Writing and Discourse Studies. Working with mpark provides her with an opportunity to learn more about digital humanities and how hands-on making encourages idea generation.
Emily Ivey is a PhD student at ODU studying Rhetoric, Writing, and Discourse Studies and Technology and Media Studies. She hopes that working with mpark will provide an opportunity to develop new ways to help students connect with English studies by making the classroom more inclusive.