Participant Info

First Name
Abigail
Last Name
Mullen
Country
United States
State
46
Affiliation
George Mason University
Website URL
abbymullen.org
Keywords
US Navy, Barbary Wars, First Barbary War, diplomacy, nineteenth century, early republic, United States, print culture, newspapers, digital history, research management
Availability
Media Contact
Additional Contact Information
PhD
PhD

Personal Info

Photo
About Me

Abigail Mullen is currently a term assistant professor in the history department at George Mason University. She completed a PhD in history from Northeastern University in 2017. Her book (under contract with Johns Hopkins University Press), A Difficult Undertaking: Conflict and Cooperation in the First Barbary War, 1801-1805, approaches the early American navy from the perspective of international relations and everyday interactions that made the navy’s war in the Mediterranean possible.

At GMU, Mullen teaches digital history and military history courses on both the graduate and undergraduate level. Her focus is on expanding students’ ways of telling historical stories using digital methods. She is the PI on Tropy, a Mellon-funded software project at the Roy Rosenweig Center for History and New Media that provides researchers with a way to organize and describe their research photos. She is also the PI on an NEH-funded Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities, Digital Methods for Military History, which will take place in summer 2021.

Mullen was an inaugural Fellow at Northeastern’s NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks, where she worked as a research assistant on the Viral Texts project. Her research into 19th-century print networks has resulted in two peer-reviewed co-authored publications in leading literary journals, as well as numerous conference presentations. She also organized and wrote a grant for an NEH-funded workshop to teach military historians tools for digital history.

Recent Publications

‘Fugitive Verses’: Poetry, Attribution, and Circulation in Nineteenth-Century American Newspapers,” with Ryan Cordell,  in American Periodicals (Spring 2017).

“Computational Methods for Uncovering Reprinted Texts in Antebellum Newspapers,” with David Smith and Ryan Cordell, online in American Literary History 27.3 (August 2015).

Media Coverage
Country Focus
United States
Expertise by Geography
Atlantic, Mediterranean, United States
Expertise by Chronology
4, 5
Expertise by Topic
American Founding Era, Computational, Diplomacy, Libraries & Archives, Military, Public History