Em Nordling is a PhD student in English Literature at Emory University, Research Data Associate at Sounding Spirit Research Lab, and reviewer at Tor.com. Their scholarly interests include crowds, collective affect, and digital humanities.

Their past work picked up these themes from numerous perspectives—from digital archives, to creative writing, to on-the-ground activist and social justice research support. Now, as a scholar, Em has turned to British literature of the long nineteenth century to interrogate the image of the protest crowd as it relates to both the function of collective agency and to the period’s burgeoning biopolitical forces. Using quantitative textual analysis, they examine the impact of quantification itself on crowd and population control discourse of the period, and how it relates to racist scientific ideologies.