Meredith Martin and Peter Henderson

Two professors receive grants from Schmidt Sciences to use AI to accelerate humanities research

By
Jamie Saxon, Office of Communications
on Feb. 12, 2026, 8:44 a.m.

Meredith Martin and Peter Henderson 

Photos by Shelley Szwast and David Kelly Crow

Meredith Martin, professor of English and director of the Center for Digital Humanities, and Peter Henderson, assistant professor of computer science and the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, are among 23 teams of researchers around the world who have been selected by Schmidt Sciences for an award from the foundation’s new Humanities and AI Virtual Institute (HAVI).

 The highly competitive HAVI awards are designed to leverage artificial intelligence to accelerate humanities research and scholarship, according to the Schmidt Sciences announcement. “Our newest technologies may shed light on our oldest truths, on all that makes us human — from the origins of civilization to the peaks of philosophical thought to contemporary art and film,” said co-founder Wendy Schmidt. 

Martin’s work will use AI tools to analyze English poetry across millenia, Henderson’s to better understand American legal thinking across jurisdictions since the nation’s founding. 

Three other scholars with Princeton connections also received grants: Class of 1982 alum Peter Bol; former postdoc Jim Casey; and Giovanna Ceserani, a past fellow in Princeton’s Society of Fellows.

Interpreting the law and its evolution

Henderson is the lead PI for the project "AI for Understanding the Law and Its Evolution,” which was awarded a grant of $500,000 over three years. 

The project will bring together legal scholars, historians and computer scientists to build open AI tools that can assist with legal and historical research across vast collections of cases, statutes, oral arguments and historical documents in multiple languages. Using these tools, the team will study how new legal ideas are created and spread, how judges interpret statutes, and how those interpretive habits change over time and across jurisdictions. 

Deborah Pearlstein, director of Princeton SPIA's Program in Law and Public Policy and the Charles and Marie Robertson Visiting Professor in Law and Public Affairs, is one of the co-PIs on the project.

Parsing English poetry across time 

Martin is part of the international team for the project “An ML Toolkit to Find Hierarchical Structure in Multi-Modal/Lingual Data," which was awarded a grant of up to $450,000 over three years. 

The project, led by Tom Lippincott of Johns Hopkins University, will bring together experts in the U.S. and the UK in literary studies, linguistics, musicology and machine learning to create tools that use AI to analyze structural patterns in poetry, narrative fiction, and music across different languages and historical periods.

Working with the Chadwyck-Healey English Poetry corpus of 336,180 poems written between 900 C.E. and the 20th century, Martin will lead the poetry study, chronicling how the poetic structures of English verse — including form, rhyme and meter — carry meaning across time.

Grants for three more Princetonians

  • Peter Bol, a 1982 Princeton graduate alumnus and the Charles H. Carswell Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University, is leading the project "Connectivity and Individuality in Textual Traditions: Augmenting Retrieval for Eurasian Languages.” His team will train multilingual AI models to study Asian-language manuscripts for historical economic and political research.
  • Jim Casey, a former postdoc at Princeton’s Center for Digital Humanities and an assistant professor of English at the University of California-Santa Barbara who is also co-founder of the Center for Black Digital Research, is leading the project "Communities in the Loop: AI for Cultures and Contexts in Multimodal Archives." His team will create a searchable database of 19th-century Black newspapers, freely accessible to the public.
  • Giovanna Ceserani, professor of classics at Stanford University and a past fellow in Princeton’s Society of Fellows, is leading the project “SETS: A Set-Based Architecture for Knowledge Structures.” Her team will create a new AI architecture that seeks to more accurately reflect the way humans read, using languages from pre-modern Europe, Western Asia and Africa.

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