Dr Francesca Benatti

Professional biography

I joined The Open University in 2012 as a member of the Arts Faculty and I am now part of the School of Arts and Humanities and the English and Creative Writing Department. I hold a Laurea in Lettere Moderne from the University of Bologna, as well as an MA in Literature and Publishing and a PhD in English from the University of Galway.

My main role in the Faculty is to promote research in the Digital Humanities as the co-lead of DH_OU, the Digital Humanities Research Group (web). I am a member of the READ-IT project, the Reading Experience Database, the History of Books and Reading Research Group, the Film and Media Research Group, the Gender and Otherness in the Humanities (GOTH) Research Centre, the European Romanticism in Association and RÊVE project and the Open Arts Archive. 

Research interests

Please note that there are other researchers named Francesca Benatti active in different fields; visit my ORCID for an up-to-date publication list:  orcid.org/0000-0002-1456-7812

My research interests range from book history to comics to hypertext to nineteenth-century Irish literature and periodicals. The Digital Humanities represent the common thread in my research. I use digital approaches to study the Humanities and investigate digital cultures, texts and hypertexts through Humanities perspectives. 

My Cambridge Element Innovations in Digital Comics (available Open Access) investigates webcomics as an innovative convergence between digital platforms and participatory cultures. As the Program Chair of the ACM Hypertext 2023 conference, I brought together computer scientists, book historians and electronic literature creators to discuss how hypertext is shaping media and communication cultures. Within the READ-IT project, I have worked with colleagues from several European countries to develop digital tools for the study of reading in Europe.

Teaching interests

I am the author of a unit on Electronic Literature for the A335 Literature in Transition module and of a unit on the ​illustrated novel Stardust for the Level 2 module A233 Telling Stories: The Novel and Beyond. For the MA in English Literature, I have authored two units on Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South and William Gibson's Pattern Recognition. I am also the co-author of a unit on digital resources, archives and manuscripts and of a unit on researching manuscript, print and digital texts.

Impact and engagement

In 2023 I featured in the BBC Radio 4 programme Opening Lines on Alessandro Mazoni's The Betrothed.

In 2019-2020 I led the development of the free OpenLearn course Digital Humanities: Humanities Research in the Digital Age, which was funded by the OOC Doctoral Training Partnership and for which I wrote two sessions. 

In 2014-2019, I led the Arts and Humanities in the Digital Age (AHDA) training programme for the CHASE doctoral training partnership, which provided Digital Humanities training to over 100 students.

In 2017-18 I was the Social Media Champion for the School of Arts and Cultures, working to promote the research and teaching activities of the School through social media.

External collaborations

I was a Consultant Editor, responsible for web publication, for the Open Arts Journal, an Open University open-access, peer-reviewed journal, during the period 2012-2015.

International links

Before joining The Open University, I worked in University College Dublin and at the University of Galway. While in UCD, I taught courses on digital humanities and collaborated with the Irish Virtual Research Library and Archive (IVRLA) on integrating digital resources and teaching.

At the University of Galway, I worked with the Thomas Moore Archive, a project of the Moore Institute, NUI Galway, of which I am joint editor with Prof Sean Ryder and Dr Justin Tonra. For the TMA I developed a digital edition of a selection of Thomas Moore’s prose writings, and designed the web interface of the project.