Chris Johanson
Associate Professor
Fields of Interest: Digital Humanities, VR, Latin Literature, Space, Mapping, the Ancient City
Research
I joined the faculty in 2008 as part of a Division-wide initiative to build a digital humanities program at UCLA. My research applies the tools and techniques of digital humanities and the analytical methodologies of classics to social historical problems. I am currently developing a hybrid, geo-temporal publication tentatively titled Funerary Spectacle: Aristocratic Display in the Roman Forum, which is a study of material and literary contexts set within a digital laboratory.
My work on the Roman world connects to a larger discussion on the evolution of scholarly tools and communication, and I am keenly interested in developing new methods of historical visualization, knowledge representation, and geo-temporal argumentation. As Co-Director of the UCLA Experiential Technologies Center and as a founding member of the UCLA Digital Humanities Program, I have collaborated on mapping projects set in Bolivia, Peru, Albania, Iceland, Spain, Turkey and Italy.