Colleen M. Tripp

I'm fascinated by the stories people build, inhabit, and share—from nineteenth-century novels and television to theme parks and digital media. As a Professor of English and Associate Chair at California State University, Northridge, I bring together literary studies, popular culture, curriculum innovation, and public-facing humanities in both my scholarship and teaching. My current work explores worldbuilding across literature, theme parks, television, and other forms of popular culture, examining how narrative worlds shape public imagination and cultural experience.

My scholarship has appeared in Studies in American Fiction, Nineteenth-Century Studies, The Journal of American Culture, Humanities, and The Journal of Transnational American Studies, among others. In 2026, I was honored with CSUN's Distinguished Teaching, Counseling, or Librarianship Award.

I'm especially interested in projects that connect humanities scholarship with public audiences through digital methods, AI, and collaborative research. In 2023, I served as an English Consultant for Scale AI, developing evaluation rubrics to support accurate, safe, and responsible AI-generated content. I have also contributed to the Mellon-funded WhatEvery1Says project, where I used machine-learning methods (topic modeling) to analyze large-scale public discourse about the humanities. My earlier digital humanities work includes serving as a text encoder for major digital archives such as the Women Writers Project.