Focus areas

Much computational work on emotion in literature focuses on sentiment analysis, which measures emotional valence rather than examining how characters explicitly describe and articulate feelings. This project investigates diachronic patterns in the linguistic description of emotion in British dramatic literature, examining how characters represent their own emotional states and those of others through direct naming, metaphor, and narrative reflection. 

Drawing on a corpus of 430 British plays from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries sourced from the Drama Corpora (DraCor), the study employs large-scale computational analysis to examine three central research questions: (1) how descriptions of emotion change over time, (2) how emotional description differs across genres (tragedy, comedy, and tragicomedy), and (3) whether character identity influences the ways in which emotion is represented. 

Grounded in multiple theories of emotion, the project seeks to produce a quantitative literary history of descriptions of emotion in early modern dramatic British texts. 

Gretel is a third-year PhD candidate in the Department of English, Linguistics and Theatre Studies at the National University of Singapore. Her research focuses on computational methods for literary studies. Her doctoral project investigates methods for emotion detection using LLMs to map emotional trajectories in sixteenth to seventeenth century English literature. She teaches GEI1002 “Computers and the Humanities” at National University of Singapore and has taught at the Language and Communication Centre at Nanyang Technological University. 

Between August and December 2026, she will join Bielefeld University as a visiting PhD candidate at Berenike Herrmann’s research group.