Carol Chiodo, Ph.D.


Creating and delivering exceptional teaching and research services for distinctive collections have defined Carol’s career in academic libraries. With demonstrated success in leading strategic digital transformation initiatives, Carol’s work leverages cutting edge technology to support innovative teaching and research for students, faculty and researchers. Her management is defined by a commitment to professional practices and innovative services to meet the changing needs of students, faculty and staff. Her high level training in the humanities and computational methods as well as her background in publishing provide her with a unique understanding of the transformative role and responsibilities of research libraries in today’s rapidly evolving information landscape.

She is currently the Director of Distinctive Collections and Digital Scholarship at The Claremont Colleges Library. In this role, she has connected the departments within her portfolio to augment services and ensure sustainability. These units include The Asian Library and Special Collections and Archives and is responsible for technology planning, collections outreach and programming. As a member of the Library Leadership Team, she plays a key role in budget and strategic planning in support of the seven colleges that comprise The Claremont Colleges Consortium (Pomona College, Scripps College, Harvey Mudd College, Claremont McKenna College, Pitzer College, Keck Graduate Institute, and Claremont Graduate University).

Before joining Claremont, she was the Librarian for Collections and Digital Scholarship in the Americas, Europe and Oceania Division at Harvard University Library. She has taught courses and workshops on cultural heritage, emerging technologies, and scholarly communications at a number of universities in the U.S. and abroad, including Yale, Princeton, University of Leipzig (Germany), NYU Abu Dhabi (UAE), Jagiellonian University (Krakow, Poland), Université Marie et Louis Pasteur (Besançon, France), Babeş-Bolyai University (Cluj-Napoca, Romania) and Meiji Gakuin University (Tokyo, Japan).

She serves as chair of the Student Engagement Committee for the Board of Yale Graduate School Alumni Association, an advisory board member of The Harvard Library Bulletin, and a member of the external advisory board of the Research Center for the Humanities at Aston University in Birmingham, UK. In 2024, she joined the advisory board of the new open access journal, Computational Humanities Research published by Cambridge University Press. She has served for over a decade as a member of the Scientific Committee for the European Summer University in Digital Humanities. More recently, she is a contributor to the Ethical Stewardship Planning Group convened by the Getty Research Institute.

Carol also has an active research agenda situated at the crossroads of Global Medieval and Early Modern Studies, History of the Book, and Translation Studies. Her research attends to the history of a text’s travels, translations, and travails, with a secondary focus on the textual representations of libraries and collections.  Her postdoctoral research, conducted at the Digital Humanities Lab at Yale University Library, used large language models and social network analysis to identify and analyze 19th century reading communities focused on Dante’s Divine Comedy.

A former faculty member at Princeton and Yale in the departments of French and Italian and Italian Studies respectively, she organized the Dante Society of America’s virtual symposium at Harvard in May 2021, bringing together scholars, poets, and readers from across the globe for the 700th Anniversary Commemoration. She has published widely on Dante Alighieri’s reception among women readers in North America and edited the book, Dante’s Volume: From Alpha to Omega, published by ACMRS Press. Her next book, nearing completion, is on the cross-border and cross- linguistic fortunes of Dante, Boccaccio and Petrarch among readers in North America. She also has a manuscript in preparation on collaborative modes of vernacular literary production in Italy and England against the backdrop of 16th century religious reform in Europe.

She received her Ph.D. in Italian Language and Literature from Yale University.

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