I'm a PhD candidate at UT-Austin in Hispanic literature working on an interdisciplinary dissertation remotely from Washington, DC. My dissertation is a case study of two early modern Iberian authors, both captive in the same Algerian jail cell, and how they wrote the other, with special consideration of racial and ethnic difference. I am rather computer-savvy but hope to be able to participate in this in order to sharpen my technological skills so that as a scholar I may efficiently and effectively collaborate with other departments and specializations with the academy. In my spare time I run a small cooking blog, but professionally speaking I am most interested in conceiving of how other scholars are incorporating technology and computing power in the field of early modern historical or literary studies, generally. I am specifically interested in the notion of social networking in the early modern Mediterranean.