Claudia Carroll is a Notebaert Fellow and Ph.D. student in English Literature at the University of Notre Dame, with a minor in Irish Studies. Her research focuses on the nineteenth-century novel through a narrative theory and cognitive science lens. She is currently working on a dissertation on why characters feel real to readers of the Victorian novel. The project uses approaches from computational text analysis and cognitive psychology to explain why we think about certain literary characters like real people--developing attachments to them, speculating about their behaviour in hypothetical situations, and feeling like we know them like we know our friends and family. Claudia’s other interests include fictional representations of history, cultural memory and narratology.

Claudia received her undergraduate degree in History and English Literature from Trinity College Dublin in 2015. While at Notre Dame, she has taught in courses in English, Writing and Rhetoric, and Film, Television and Theatre. She is also the founder of the Cyborg Series, a guest speaker and seminar series at Notre Dame on the topic of interdisciplinary research across STEM and humanities boundaries. Claudia is a member of the International Society for the Study of Narrative (ISSN) and the North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA). She has presented her research at the NAVSA conference as well as the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR) conference, and the American Conference for Irish Studies (ACIS).