Carmen Smith earned her B.A. in English with a focus on 6-12 education at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. At UNL, she received her M.A. and Ph.D. in Literature with a specialization in 19th Century American Literature and Digital Humanities. She has taught a variety of composition and literature courses at UNL since 2012 in her role as a graduate teaching assistant, and is now a lecturer in the English Department at UNL. Carmen is a native German speaker, and her interest in languages and expression translates into her teaching interests and research focus on voices and expression in literature, as reflected in her dissertation Almost Speechless: Representations of Womanhood and Female Voices in Turn-of-the-Century American Novels. She has worked extensively as the associate investigator and a primary encoder on Austen Said: Patterns of Diction in Jane Austen's Major Novels, an online project examining, among other aspects, patterns of free indirect discourse and direct dialogue by Austen's characters.