Laura B. McGrath specializes in computational literary criticism and contemporary American literature. She holds a Ph.D. in English from Michigan State University. Prior to joining the faculty at Temple, she was associate director of the Literary Lab at Stanford University. Her research and teaching focus on American literature post-1945, digital humanities and cultural analytics, literary sociology, and contemporary literary production. She is at work on a book called Middlemen: Literary Agents and the Making of Contemporary American Literature, under contract with Princeton UP, and supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities. She draws on a range of methods — data analysis, close reading, literary ethnography — to reveal the literary agent’s centrality in the development of American literature, post-1965.