Before starting my doctorate, I worked as a full-time social media manager and content writer for New York University's Center for Data Science, where I translated the faculty's published research about AI and natural language processing into accessible terms for the public. These interests continue to shape my academic career, where I not only engage with the digital humanities as much as the historical past, but also use digital tools to place academia in contact with the wider public. I also like books and films that explore the possibilities of digital technology. Some of my favorites are Black Mirror's "San Junipero," "Bête Noire," "White Bear," and "Striking Vipers" (in that order); Kogonada's After Yang; Liu Cixin / 刘慈欣's trilogy The Three-Body Problem / 三体 (with a special interest in The Dark Forest book); and the Matrix series.
Teaching
I direct a digital teaching project, Brontë Social. Born out of the global nineteenth century literature and culture undergraduate course that I teach annually at Iowa, Brontë Social asks my students to reimagine what the social media profiles of the characters from various Brontë novels might look like if they were alive today, based on what we have learned about them in the novels and relevant scholarship about nineteenth-century imperialism, race, gender, and class. In Fall 2025, we examined Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. In Fall 2026, we will examine Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights. Before teaching at Iowa, I also taught classes about digital writing and digital tools for undergraduate expository writing courses. I have published about some of my teaching in this area, especially the use of Wikipedia as a teaching tool, in The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy.
Digital Archives
I have experience digitally transcribing and TEI encoding nineteenth-century manuscripts through my internship with The Michael Field Diaries project. I am now developing my own digital archival project based on my research.
Web Design
I like making websites. This website is purposefully lightweight (HTML/CSS with some light javascript only), and its code is freely available on my GitHub repository (@cherriekwok) so that it can act as a template for anyone who would like to try their hand at making their own website. If you learn how to make your own website and host it on GitHub, then you not only have more control over your online presence, but it is also free for perpetuity—meaning that you do not have to pay someone else (or another platform) to make it for you.