Professor Alexandra Bolintineanu joined the Centre for Medieval Studies and Woodsworth College in 2016. Her research focuses on medieval wonders and monsters, digital pedagogy and illegal typewriters. Her major achievement has been creating and coordinating Woodsworth’s minor program in Digital Humanities, for which she designed the curriculum and designed and taught the first nine new courses. Program courses combine research and critical analysis with experiential learning, as students visit rare book collections and museums, and work hands-on with text encoding, digital mapping, data visualization, augmented and virtual reality and 3D printing.

Students in Professor Bolintineanu’s courses learn to create digital exhibits and maps, turn medieval riddles into video games, and build digital archives of the lives of banned and endangered books. In one course, students analyzed the usability of their own teaching platform, Bb Collaborate. The project resulted in a journal publication with undergraduate students as co-authors. In a fourth-year capstone seminar, students join the research teams of digital humanities faculty across the university, where they gain experience in real-world research while also producing their own final projects.

Beyond university classrooms, Bolintineanu collaborated with U of T’s The Book and the Silk Roads project to design an online exhibit, Hidden Stories along the Silk Roads, a companion to a major exhibition at the Aga Khan Museum—a valuable resource during the museum’s pandemic closures. This resource fed back into the classroom: Professor Bolintineanu’s students visited the exhibition, studied its artifacts, and learned from curators, museum educators, and collections specialists about the challenges and behind-the-scenes work of a major museum exhibition.

In addition to the Early Career Teaching Award, Professor Bolintineanu received the Canadian Society for Digital Humanities Outstanding Early Career Award (2019) and the Centers and Regional Associations (CARA) Teaching Prize of the Medieval Academy of America (2023).