As inaugural Contemporary Publishing Fellow, Cosette Bruhns Alonso spearheads a pilot collaboration between the Center for Research Data and Digital Scholarship and the University of Pennsylvania Press to design and develop digital publications through innovative uses of multimodal and interactive digital enhancements. She collaborates with campus partners, including the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books, and Manuscripts, the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies, Penn Museum, and the McNeil Center for Early American Studies to develop strategic and sustainable digital publications driven by faculty research and archival collections. Beyond the University of Pennsylvania campus, she works to advance collaborative, accessible, and antiracist digital publishing practices as a member of the Library Publishing Coalition’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee.

Prior to joining Penn, Cosette held the position of Diversity in Digital Publishing & Italian Studies Postdoctoral Research Associate at Brown University, where she facilitated the NEH Institute on Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities, Born-Digital Scholarly Publishing: Resources and Roadmaps. She also supported the editorial and digital development of faculty publications and curated an exhibition in Brown University’s Rockefeller Library on Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron and Covid-era viral art.

Cosette holds a PhD and MA in Italian Studies from the University of Chicago, and a BA in Philosophy from the New School. She has experience in digital scholarship, editorial development, and in teaching art history, literature, and academic writing. She has held the position of Editorial Assistant of Dante Studies since 2019. During AY 2022-2023 she joins the Price Lab for Digital Humanities as a Mellon Seminar Fellow where she will be developing a digital project entitled, Technologies of Representation: the Decameron in Medieval to Modern Media.

Cosette Bruhns Alonso