Marit MacArthur

Marit MacArthur's picture

Continuing Lecturer

Research Areas:

AI and writing, digital voice studies, Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC), collaborative & interdisciplinary research and writing, performance studies, cultural analytics and digital humanities, open-source software development, 20th century poetry and the Anglo-American poetic tradition.

Teaching Areas:

Science writing, workplace writing, grant writing, career & professional development, and academic research.

Biography:

Prior to teaching at UC Davis, Marit MacArthur taught American literature, composition and creative writing at CSU Bakersfield for 15 years. Since 2017 she has taught full-time at UC Davis, including advanced composition, professional writing, proposals, and graduate-level writing. She is also a faculty affiliate in Performance Studies.

Education:

MFA, Warren Wilson College (2013)

Ph.D., UC Davis (2005)

B.A., Northwestern University (1996)

Awards:

Principal Investigator and Lead Writer, PAIRR (Peer and AI Review + Reflection). UC Davis. AI Grand Challenge grant, California Learning Lab. 3-year project in collaboration with three CSUs and four California Community Colleges ($1.5 million). 2025-2027. 
 
NEH-Mellon Fellowship for Digital Publication ($30,000), UC Davis. 2024. 
 
Co-Investigator. Center for Artificial Intelligence and Experimental Futures (CAIEF), UC Davis. NEH Humanities Research Centers on Artificial Intelligence ($499,717). 2024-2027. 
 
Lead writer. “Assessing the impact of AI & peer feedback in small composition and large writing-intensive courses across the curriculum.” Association for Writing Across the Curriculum (AWAC) Research Initiative Grant. 2024. 
 
Co-Investigator. “SpokenWeb.” SSHRC Partnership Grant (Can$2.5 million), 2018-2025. Lead development, maintenance and research using state-of-the-art open-source LLM for speech recognition and a vocal analysis tool, to analyzing speech recordings. Supervise undergraduate and graduate research assistants in computer science and UX design. 
 
Co-Principal Investigator. “Tools for Listening to Text-in-Performance.” NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant ($75,000), 2018-19. Led development of state-of-the-art open-source LLM for speech recognition and a vocal analysis tool. Trained 20 humanities scholars in 9 disciplines from 17 universities in the U.S. and Canada, in using the tools for research.
 
ACLS Digital Innovations Fellowship ($75,000), 2015-16. 
 
Principal Investigator and Lead Writer. “Camp to Campus.” Cal Humanities Community Stories Grant ($10,000), 2012-13. CSU Bakersfield. Led an interdisciplinary research and documentary film project about first-generation college graduates from a migrant labor background. Collaborated with CAMP program and screened film at colleges. 
 
Research Council of the University Grants, CSU Bakersfield ($1,000 - $6,000), CSUB, 2006, 2011, 2012, 2014, 2017
 
Community Engagement Fellowship, CSU Bakersfield, 2011-12. 
 
Fulbright Research Fellow, University of Lodz, Poland, August – December 2008. 
 
Edwin L. Shuman Senior Award, Best English Major, Northwestern University, 1996.
 

ACLS Digital Innovations Fellowship, 2015-16

Nominated for Faculty Leadership and Service Award by the Dean of Arts & Humanities, CSUB, 2014

Cal Humanities Community Stories Fund grant, 2012-13

Community Engagement Fellowship, CSUB, 2011-12

Research Council of the University Grants, CSUB, 2006, 2011, 2012, 2014, 2017

Faculty Diversity Grant, CSUB, 2005

Fulbright Research Fellowship, University of Lodz, Poland, Fall 2008

Humanities Research Award, UC Davis, 2003

Summer Research Fellowship, UC Davis, 2002

Graduate Student Travel Award, UC Davis, 2002

Dissertation Workshop Fellowship, Center for History, Society and Culture, UC Davis, 2002

Edwin L. Shuman Senior Award, Best English Major, Northwestern University, 1996

TriQuarterly Essay Prize, Northwestern University, 1996

Publications: 

MacArthur, Marit. “Commercial GenAI Is a Good Idea for Teaching Writing.” Forthcoming in Bad Ideas about AI and Writing: Toward Generative Practices for Teaching, Learning, and Communication. Ed. Christopher Basgier et al. The WAC Clearing House: 2025.

MacArthur, Marit, Minnillo, Sophia, Sperber, Lisa, Stillman, Nicholas and Whithaus, Carl. “Teaching the Game while Leveling the Field: Pairing Peer Review with AI Feedback in a Business Writing Course.” Forthcoming in Frontiers in Communication, 2025.

MacArthur, Marit. (25 June 2025). “Large Language Models and the Problem of Rhetorical Debt.” MacArthur, M. (25 June 2025). AI & Society.

Sperber, Lisa, MacArthur, Marit, Minnillo, Sophia, Stillman, Nicholas and Whithaus, Carl. (June 2025). “Peer and AI Review + Reflection (PAIRR): A Human-Centered Approach to Formative Assessment.” Computers and Composition.

MacArthur, Marit and Miller, Lee M. “Sound and Performance.” The Cambridge Companion to Literature in the Digital Age. Ed. Adam Hammond. New York: Cambridge UP, 2024.

MacArthur, Marit. “AI, Expertise and the Convergence of Writing and Coding.” Inside Higher Ed. Sept. 28, 2023.

MacArthur, Marit. “Saving Expertise, or Critical Editing as Manslaughter-by-AI Prevention Strategy.” Digital Rhetoric Collaborative. August 7, 2023.

MacArthur, Marit and Miller, Lee M. “Slow Listening: Digital Tools for Voice Studies.” Digital Humanities Quarterly. 17:2, July 2023.

MacArthur, Marit. “Making a Space for Epistemology and Aesthetics in Voice Studies.” Kalfou: A Journal of Comparative and Relational Ethnic Studies 9:2 (2022): 274-279.

MacArthur, Marit, Rambsy, Howard, Wu, Xiaoliu, Ding, Qin, and Miller, Lee M., “101 Black Women Poets in Mainly White and Mainly Black Rooms.” August 27, 2022, Los Angeles Review of Books.

MacArthur, Marit. “(Only) Collaborate.” Journal of Cultural Analytics. Oct. 11, 2021.

MacArthur, Marit. “John Ashbery’s Reading Voice.” Oct. 29, 2019. The Paris Review Online.

MacArthur, Marit and Miller, Lee M. “After Scansion: Visualizing, Deforming and Listening to Poetic Prosody.” Stanford ARCADE Colloquy Series: Alternative Histories of Prosody, Dec. 13, 2018. [Essay and podcast]

MacArthur, Marit, Zellou, Georgia and Miller, Lee M. “Beyond Poet Voice: Sampling the Performance Styles of 100 American Poets.” Journal of Cultural Analytics, March 2018.

MacArthur, Marit. The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music, by Nina Sun Eidsheim. The Yale Review 106.4 (Oct. 2018).

MacArthur, Marit. “Introducing Simple Open-Source Tools for Performative Speech Analysis: Gentle and Drift.” Jacket2. June 6, 2016. Web.

MacArthur, Marit.  “Monotony, the Churches of Poetry Reading, and Sound Studies.” PMLA 131.1 (Jan. 2016): 38-63.

MacArthur, Marit. “Figures of the Tourist and Guide in Frost.” Frost in Context. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014: 225-232.

MacArthur, Marit. Across the Land and the Water: Selected Poems 1964-2001, by W.G. Sebald. The Yale Review 101:1 (Jan. 2013): 173-186.

MacArthur, Marit. “One World? The Poetics of Passenger Flight and the Perception of the Global.” PMLA 127:1 (March 2012): 264-282.

MacArthur, Marit. “The Skinny on Schuyler's Line.” Jacket2. June 30, 2012. Web.

MacArthur, Marit. “Pounding the Golden Treasury: The Exceptions of Hardy and Frost.” The Robert Frost Review (2010): 98-111.

MacArthur, Marit. “Some Problems with Translating Polish Poetry.” Contemporary Poetry Review. Dec. 23, 2010. Web.

MacArthur, Marit. The Collected Poems of Zbigniew Herbert, trans. Alissa Valles. Poetry International, 2009.

MacArthur, Marit. The Collected Poems and On the Edge: The Long Poems by Kenneth Koch. “The Adolescent.” Contemporary Poetry Review, 2008. Web.

MacArthur, Marit. The Notebooks of Robert Frost, ed. Robert Faggen. “Talking Points.” The Yale Review 95.4 (October 2007): 141-153.

MacArthur, Marit. Edgar Allan Poet & The Juke-Box. Uncollected Poems, Drafts and Fragments, by Elizabeth Bishop. Modern Language Studies (Summer 2006)

MacArthur, Marit. “Rhythms of Grief in The Poems of 1912-13.” Poetry Criticism 92, December 2008. [Originally published in the Thomas Hardy Journal 20:1 (February 2004): 38-48.]

MacArthur, Marit. “‘In a Room’: Elizabeth Bishop in Europe, 1935-1937.” Texas Studies in Literature & Language 50:4 (Winter 2008): 408-442.

MacArthur, Marit. The American Landscape in the Poetry of Frost, Bishop and Ashbery: The House Abandoned. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

MacArthur, Marit. “Diving into the Unknown: A Love Like Death in D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love.” Like a Black and White Kaleidoscope Tossed at Random: Essays on D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love, ed. Phillipe Romanski and Jean-Paul Richardie (Rouen: Publications de l’Université de Rouen, 2001): 83-96.

 

 

Selected Reviews

On Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle, vol. 6. Contemporaries. Post45. Yale University. Nov. 13 and Dec. 6, 2018. http://post45.research.yale.edu/2018/12/my-struggle-vol-6-marit-macarthu...

http://post45.research.yale.edu/2018/11/my-struggle-vol-6-marit-macarthu...

MacArthur, Marit. “Making a Space for Epistemology and Aesthetics in Voice Studies.” Kalfou: A Journal of Comparative and Relational Ethnic Studies 9:2 (2022): 274-279.

The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music, by Nina Sun Eidsheim. The Yale Review 106.4 (Oct. 2018).  https://yalereview.yale.edu/music-review-musicologist-nina-eidsheim

Across the Land and the Water: Selected Poems 1964-2001, by W.G. Sebald. The Yale Review 101.1 (Jan. 2013): 173-186.

The Collected Poems of Zbigniew Herbert, trans. Alissa Valles. Poetry International, 2009.

The Notebooks of Robert Frost, ed. Robert Faggen. “Talking Points.” The Yale Review 95.4 (October 2007): 141-153.

 

Selected Translations

“(Polish) Poetry after Różewicz.” Co-curated feature with eleven poets. Jacket2. November 2015. Web.

Two poems by Edward Pasewicz. World Literature Today. September 2013. Web.

Twelve poems by Adam Wiedemann. Verse 27:2 & 3, 2012: 5-32.

Five poems by Jerzy Jarniewicz. American Poetry Review 36:6 (November/December 2007): 55.