Below are the statements from our candidates for the ACH 2019 election. We are happy to offer our members a diverse slate of 14 potential candidates for the 3 new regular member spots on the ACH Executive Council (current members here). This year, we do not have any openings for new officers (e.g. President, Secretary).
The election will run from February 20th through March 6th, 2019. Voting is limited to current ACH members; you will vote for 3 people.
Candidates are listed alphabetically by last name:
- Alyssa Alabassi
- Gabriela Baeza
- Tara Carlisle
- Will Fenton
- Sylvia Fernández
- Tassie Gniady
- Matthew Hannah
- Christy Hyman
- Nathan Kelber
- Anna E. Kijas
- Rebecca Sutton Koeser
- Zoe LeBlanc
- Brad Rittenhouse
- Andie Silva
Alyssa Alabassi
Bio statement
As a medical doctor, I have a long standing interest in the influence of philosophy, ethics, psychology, law, art, social care, history, culture and health geography on medical education, communication, decision making, practice and safety; not to mention the provision of an additional perspective to the science. Although Medicine is classified as a scientific field, historically and practically it has always been an interdisciplinary endeavour, and continuing the link with the humanities paves the way for progress and innovation. Over a decade ago, I had the opportunity to work at the Advanced Computation Laboratory at Cancer Research UK devising computerised solutions using virtual reality and artificial intelligence to create an integrated and connected patient-care pathway with the prime objective of improving communication and reducing errors. This has piqued my interest in what digital technology can offer. I have since been involved in the emerging field of data science and Big Data together with its use in predictive analysis with particular reference to disease prevention.
Candidate statement
An area I’d like to work on with ACH is the development of the field of digital medical humanities as an invaluable resource for innovation and research in the medical field and an integral part of medical training. Society is constantly evolving and in this digital age, the rate of change is particularly rapid. The humanities provide insights into basic and universal human concerns. Knowledge of disease and its treatment, alone, are not sufficient since decisions on treatment and prevention continue to have a base in ethics and continue to be affected by economic and cultural landscapes. The use of population-based solutions utilizing information technology interdigitates all of the above optimising the provision of care by the application of an interdisciplinary approach.
Gabriela Baeza
Bio statement
I am the co-founder of the US Latina/o Digital Humanities Research initiative at the Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage Program (Recovery) at Arte Público Press and the University of Houston. With this initiate, we hope to extend the mission of the international Recovery program to locate, preserve and disseminate Latino culture in the United States in its written form since colonial times to the 1960s into the digital arena. The program has compiled a comprehensive bibliography of Spanish-language books, manuscripts, a microfilm, collection of approximately 1400 historical newspapers, hundreds of thousands of microfilmed and digitized items, a vast collection of photographs and an extensive authority list as well as personal papers.
As associate professor of US Latina/o literature in a Spanish program, she has taught graduate and undergraduate courses that incorporate digital humanities projects and scholarship.
Candidate statement
I am honored to have been nominated for an executive council of ACH and if elected, my goals would be to continue efforts to truly diversify DH by including representatives from underrepresented communities (ethnic, gender, disabled and age, for example) as well as to raising awareness and being supportive in the inclusion of Latina/o and Spanish-language materials, as well as other non-English language works within the research, conferences, publication and other research activities. As editor of non-profit Latina/o publishing house I am aware of the impact that languages other than English can have in social, academic and public discourse. In terms of pedagogy, I am always interested in exploring and strategizing ways in which graduate students can be encouraged and trained in digital scholarship at their institutions to better prepare them for employment opportunities. I would welcome the opportunity to work with Mentoring Programme to further the wonderful work they have been doing until now.
Tara Carlisle
Bio statement
Tara Carlisle is head of the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Oklahoma Libraries where she works with faculty, students, and technologists to explore new avenues in humanities computing research. Each year, the Digital Scholarship Lab hosts a regional two-day conference, Research Bazaar, that promotes new research methods using open source digital tools. Throughout the year, the Lab offers software and data carpentry workshops and a brown bag series focusing on digital humanities topics and projects. Previously, Tara was project development coordinator for the statewide repository The Portal to Texas History and was the lead administrator for up to 30 digitization grants annually that included teaching digitization and metadata standards. Tara serves on the curriculum committee for OU’s Digital Humanities Graduate Certification and on the Digital Public Library of America’s Members Council and Assessment Working Group.
Candidate statement
If elected to the Executive Council for ACH, I would advocate for undergraduate and graduate student participation in humanities computing research. As head of OU’s Digital Scholarship Lab, I am able to see how our digital scholarship initiatives have a deep and lasting impact on students. Each semester we offer a graduate student assistantship in the Digital Scholarship Lab and two undergraduate digital scholarship internships. Our students enter knowing nothing about the field of digital humanities and most have low technical skills. Yet under our guidance and with time to fully immerse themselves in a digital humanities project of their choosing, these students inevitably exceed their own expectations. One undergraduate history major revealed a natural affinity for programming and used it for a history project; others discovered a new career opportunity in geohumanities; another decided to seek a graduate degree in information science; and all left more confident in their abilities to learn new digital applications and apply what they learned to other classes. We have read the reports about humanities programs losing students, and we must seize the opportunity to promote innovative approaches to research at graduate and undergraduate levels across the humanities.
Will Fenton
Bio statement
Will Fenton is the Director of Scholarly Innovation at the Library Company of Philadelphia and the Creative Director of Redrawing History: Indigenous Perspectives on Colonial America (The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage). He earned his Ph.D. from Fordham University in August 2018 (Department of English), specializing in early American literature and the digital humanities. During his graduate study, Fenton served as a research assistant, teaching fellow, teaching associate, and the director of the Fordham University Lincoln Center writing center. As a complement to his teaching and service, Fenton wrote regularly for PC Magazine and Inside Higher Ed about online learning and the digital humanities. Fenton conducted extensive archival work during his dissertation research thanks to the support of the American Philosophical Society; Haverford College Quaker and Special Collections; the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory; the Library Company of Philadelphia; the Modern Language Association; and the New York Public Library. His digital humanities project, Digital Paxton, emerged from those experiences. Digital Paxton was awarded first prize in the NYCDH Graduate Student Project Award (2016-17) as well as a Lapidus Initiative Digital Collections Fellowship from the Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture (summer 2018). A major grant from The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, Redrawing History: Indigenous Perspectives on Colonial America, will enable him to expand Digital Paxton as a digital collection and scholarly edition (via new funding for digitization and editing), a teaching platform (a summer institute with the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History), and a public humanities project (a public exhibition, colloquium, and educational graphic novel). Fenton joined the Library Company of Philadelphia on the eve of his dissertation defense (July 2018). As the Director of Scholarly Innovation, he is managing the Library’s seminar series (including teaching a fall seminar on early American political cartoons), building a database of alumni from the organization’s longstanding fellowship program (1987-2018), and working with researchers to promote new scholarship through the Library’s social media channels, salon talks, and podcast series (forthcoming spring 2019).
Candidate statement
If invited to serve on the ACH Executive Council, I would advocate for a public-facing DH grounded in my experiences at GLAM institutions.
During my doctoral study, I was privileged to conduct research at numerous research libraries and cultural institutions. As important as the historical records I explored was the institutional support I received: working with reference librarians compelled me to think carefully about my methodology and records; sharing my work at brown bags challenged me to scale back my disciplinary jargon; and meeting with curators and technical staff helped me critically evaluate tools and platforms through which I might translate work for researchers outside of my field.
My primary DH project, Digital Paxton, began as a companion to my dissertation research, a repository of printed materials from Pennsylvania’s first major pamphlet war. Thanks to the support of more than a dozen cultural institutions, the project has blossomed into a scholarly edition, teaching platform, and the basis of an educational graphic novel. I couldn’t have developed this project at my home institution, which has limited DH resources; and I couldn’t have realized it without the support of regional consortia (e.g. NYCDH) and research fellowships (e.g. an Omohundro digital collections fellowship). Subsequent projects dedicated to diaries and early-20th century immigration also emerged through my work at GLAM institutions.
Now I work at one of those organizations, where I help researchers translate their work into public-facing projects. Unencumbered with incentive structures associated with tenure review, institutions like the Library Company of Philadelphia are uniquely equipped to recognize, authorize, and support civic-minded digital scholarship that universities might not incentivize, especially for early-career scholars. I would be honored to extend that commitment through the ACH Executive Council. Thank you for considering my application.
Sylvia Fernández
Bio statement
I am a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Houston, where I specialize in U.S. Latino/a literature and culture with a focus on decolonial and postcolonial Digital Humanities, US-Mexico border studies, Hispanic archives and feminist theory. I have also attained the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Graduate Certificate, I am a scholar of Humanities Arts, Sciences, Technology Alliances and Collaboratory (HASTAC) interdisciplinary community and the graduate representative in the ACH2019 Program Committee. During my graduate studies, I have served as a Research Fellow with Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Legacy and I have been part of the making of the US Latina/o Digital Humanities Center.
My current collaborations include: co-founder of “Borderlands Archives Cartography”. Recently, I have worked with others on the Torn Apart / Separados project. My most current initiative, as principal creator and coordinator of the project tentatively titled “United Fronteras,” will bring together works that use a digital component to document the border regions across the globe from multiple perspectives, from colonial times to the twentieth-first century. These initiatives and collaborations reflect my work in addressing the recovery, preservation and transformation of material from the Global North and South in order to fill silences and gaps, as well as to position new tools against old questions in the Latina/o literary legacy, borderlands (United States-Mexico border) history and (im)migrant, transborder and transnational contributions.
Candidate statement
During my recent experience as the graduate representative in the ACH 2019 program committee and participating in several DH conferences in and outside of the United States I have noticed various things that I work for as part of the ACH executive council. Being part of the executive council will allow me to assist with the efforts to increase representation and support for graduate students, new scholars and POC communities that are being addressed within the organization. With my background in Latina/o/x and Border studies and my bilingual abilities in English and Spanish, I will emphasize multilingualism in any forthcoming activities, as well as to foster transborder/transnational alliances within humanities and digital studies, institutions and communities. I look to expand the mentoring program begun at ACH to develop and enhance the community of scholars that have joined the association, as well as other initiatives that can contribute to making ACH more reachable to new communities and people outside of academia.
Tassie Gniady
Bio statement
I am the manager of the Cyberinfrastructure for Digital Arts & Humanities group at Indiana University. As a staff member based in the IT-wing of the university, my experiences involve explaining DH to STEM colleagues as well as introducing DHers to our graphical desktop interface to our supercomputers. In other words, helping a diverse constituency talk to and understand what the other has to offer. I have taught Intro to Digital Humanities courses and continue to run and teach sessions in a workshop series that cover text analysis and 3D digitization. Other sessions I organize cover augmented reality, virtual reality, and advanced media. My group also co-sponsors several HASTAC fellows at IU. My external work includes being co-facilitator of the Access Group for the IMLS-funded Community Standards for 3D Preservation project, as well as being a member of FemTechNet and the newly formed Women in DH. I also advise the Mapping African-American Presence in the Midwest Project, currently in its nascent stages, at Edgewood College. Finally, I was very lucky to cut my teeth as the first Project Manager (2003-2007) for the English Broadside Ballad Archive at the University of California-Santa Barbara while doing my dissertation on monstrous women.
Candidate statement
I am passionate about two main things: lowering the barrier to entry for new DHers, especially those from underserved communities, and bridging the gap between cultural heritage practitioners (many of whom go to their own DH–Digital Heritage conferences) and our community. By acknowledging gaps in our field and working to close them, I hope to serve all of us better. I am actively working to build infrastructure internally and extra-institutionally while making sure all levels of practitioners have access to and understand the capabilities of the resources at hand–whether these are supercomputers or virtual reality experiences with drag and drop tours that run on a mobile phone and Google Cardboard. Having worked with and without grant money; as a student, as adjunct faculty, as staff; as a mentee and a mentor, I hope that my broad and long background in DH would be a good addition to the Executive Council.
Matthew Hannah
Bio statement
I am an Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities in the Libraries at Purdue University. Before that I was an Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Public and Digital Humanities at University of Iowa where I taught graduate courses in DH and helped manage digital projects.
Candidate statement
Because of my unique academic trajectory and experience, I am especially interested in supporting librarians who want to work in DH and in fostering and encouraging graduate students and postdocs in DH. I am also invested in theorizing and supporting an egalitarian and socially just university infrastructure for DH.
Christy Hyman
Bio statement
I am a fourth year doctoral student in the Department of History at the University of Nebraska Lincoln and a Digital Collections Associate for the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities. My research interests are concerned with the historical and spatial dimensions of movement across sites of trauma. I use GIS and other digital tools to observe to what extent data science and visualization can inform us of the human experience while acknowledging how those phenomena derive from oppressive systems in society.
I am also a current member of the People Not Property Slave Deeds Advisory Group a collaborative endeavor between the UNCG University Libraries, North Carolina Division of Archives and Records, and North Carolina Registers of Deeds. Our group oversees and provides recommendations for the digitization of property deeds in North Carolina referencing enslaved people. I also am the creator of a digital narrative/model of enslaved movement, The Oak of Jerusalem Flight Refuge and Reconnaissance in the Great Dismal Swamp Region.
Candidate statement
It is an honor to be nominated to run for the Association for Computers and the Humanities Executive Committee. If elected, I would be invested in amplifying the connection between digital humanities theory and praxis to larger issues dealing with social justice oriented themes in our ongoing battle to democratize the production of knowledge at our institutions as well as within our respective disciplinary fields.
I would attempt to promote less rigid meanings for what is considered digital humanities while maintaining the critical discourse that our field is known for in an effort to bring more scholars into DH. More voices mean more varied perspectives thereby allowing fresh insights to build new intellectual bridges in the work we do collectively.
As a digital humanist who is also an historian and GIS tinkerer my work has benefited greatly from cross-sector engagement and I would work very hard to emphasize the importance of recognizing the intellectual potential that bear fruit from these collaborations.
Nathan Kelber
Bio statement
I first joined ACH in 2011, but I have been involved in humanities computing and the digital humanities for over a decade now in various roles as a student, professor, public historian and now librarian at UNC Chapel Hill. My research has spanned many disciplines—and over a dozen grant projects—but the primary focus has been on media, history, and social justice. The most recent projects are “Detroit 67,” a citywide partnership to commemorate the 1967 Detroit Uprising and improve local race relations, and “On the Books: Jim Crow and Algorithms of Resistance,” a collections as data project using machine learning to discover North Carolina’s Jim Crow laws from the end of the civil war through the civil rights movement. I am most well-known as a DH community organizer, founding Network Detroit and organizing the Triangle Digital Humanities Network and Institute.
Candidate statement
As a member of the ACH Executive Council, I would invest my energy in a two key areas. First, I am dedicated to growing the DH community through the recruitment of new students. I believe that students need to be better informed about where DH work can take them both inside and outside of academia. Second, I believe that DH needs to attract more diverse talent. One pathway to diversity is for us to demonstrate the value of DH methods for doing local and public humanities work in underserved communities.
Anna E. Kijas
Bio statement
Anna E. Kijas is Senior Digital Scholarship Librarian at Boston College Libraries where she develops or manages digital projects, serving as project lead, or digital humanities consultant as appropriate. She provides instruction and training for faculty, students, and staff interested in applying computational tools and methods in their research and pedagogy. Her academic training includes master’s degrees in library and information science from Simmons College, music with a concentration in musicology from Tufts University, as well as a bachelor of arts in music literature and performance from Northeastern University.
Through musicology and libraries she became involved with digital humanities, exploring and pursuing ways in which computational methods and tools can augment scholarly writing and publishing. Kijas has a vested interest in the exploration and application of digital humanities tools and methods in historical research, and in the application of standards, including TEI and MEI, for open access research and publishing. She is also interested in supporting sustainable ways of developing digital projects through efforts, such as minimal computing.
Kijas plays an active role in the digital humanities community, at home and abroad. She established and led the Digital Humanities Interest Group for the Music Library Association (MLA) from 2013 to 2018. She is a regular peer-reviewer, including for the annual Digital Humanities conference, author manuscripts for publication, grant proposals, and digital projects. For the past three years, she has taught GIS and TEI sessions at the ARL Digital Scholarship Institute and as of 2018 became co-chair of the Curriculum Committee. She has organized, convened, and taught at various THATCamps over the years and led Wikipedia edit-a-thons and manuscript transcribe-a-thons. She is a Program Committee member for the inaugural 2019 Association of Computers and the Humanities conference (Pittsburgh), a Program Committee member for the 2019 Music Encoding Conference (Austria), a member of the TAPAS Advisory Board (2017-19) and is concluding her term on the Board of the Music Library Association in February 2019.
Candidate statement
As a digital scholarship librarian and musicologist, I collaborate on interdisciplinary and multi-modal projects with faculty, undergraduate and graduate students as well as cross-departmental staff in libraries and archives at Boston College. If elected to the ACH Executive Council, I would bring a unique perspective based on my experiences as both a scholar and librarian who is interested in pushing the boundaries of musicology (and humanities, in general) not only through the application of computational methods, but also by considering issues around diversity, accessibility, and sustainability in the data we create or curate, the research we do, and the projects we develop. In addition, I would be interested in facilitating ways in which the ACH can support a diverse membership, potentially focused on early-career or new-to-DH members, who may be looking for resources, guidance, and support.
Rebecca Sutton Koeser
Bio statement
Rebecca Sutton Koeser is the Lead Developer at the Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton University, where she leads the Development and Design Team in creating custom software for collaborative research projects with faculty. She and her team create innovative projects such as Derrida’s Margins (https://derridas-margins.princeton.edu/) and Princeton Prosody Archive (https://prosody.princeton.edu), publish open source software packages (https://cdh.princeton.edu/research/software-developed-by-cdh/), and leverage software industry best practices to develop rigorous, sustainable code. She is interested in the design and software development process in DH research, ethics and feminist perspectives on technical processes and data, and experimental humanities work, particularly data physicalization. Prior to her current position, she was a senior software engineer at Emory University Libraries for ten years. She also completed a PhD in English Literature from Emory with a dissertation reading modernist and experimental, contemporary feminist poetry as proto-hypertexts. Rebecca regularly presents at national and international Digital Humanities. Her recent article—“Trusting Others to ‘Do the Math’” (https://doi.org/10.1080/03080188.2016.1165454)—appeared in a special issue of Interdisciplinary Science Reviews dedicated to the subject of software and scholarship and meditates on what level of technical knowledge is sufficient for non-technical researchers using software and how to properly credit technical contributors to software-based research projects.
Candidate statement
I will continue the tradition of “alt-ac” representation on the ACH Executive Council, providing a specifically software developer’s perspective on DH. I will provide technical consulting and oversight to ACH websites, projects, and publications. By representing ACH interests within the larger Research Software Engineer (RSE) community, I will ensure that the concerns and successes of DH software development are represented in the nascent U.S. RSE community as they are in the UK (https://rse.ac.uk/). I am excited about the new ACH conference, with its openness to experimental and creative approaches from a wide range of practitioners, and I look forward to carrying that forward to subsequent conferences and other activities sponsored by ACH.
Zoe LeBlanc
Bio statement
Zoe LeBlanc is currently a PhD Candidate in History at Vanderbilt University and a digital humanities developer at the Scholars’ Lab at the University of Virginia. At Vanderbilt, Zoe is completing a digital history dissertation that leverages computational and statistical methods to explore the meaning and scale of anti-colonialism in Egyptian news media in the 1950s and 60s. At the Scholars’ Lab, Zoe helps build digital humanities tools and teaches humanities graduate students the foundations of programming and data analysis. Prior to graduate school, Zoe had no experience with programming or statistics, but a chance to become a HASTAC scholar at Vanderbilt’s Center for Teaching and Learning changed the course of her career. After attending HILT and DHSI and getting hooked on coding, Zoe completed a part-time coding bootcamp in Nashville to learn how to build the research tools she wished existed. Zoe has also been a graduate fellow at the Vanderbilt Institute of Digital Learning and the Vanderbilt Center for Digital Humanities. Currently, she is part of the editorial board of the Programming Historian and serves on committees for the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.
Candidate statement
In July 2017, I posted a twitter thread about my struggle to learn the skills necessary for digital humanities research. I remember feeling so discouraged at that point because I had done multiple DH summer institutes and digital humanities fellowships, and still I felt so far from being able to do the research I saw other DH scholars producing. The response to my tweets was overwhelming and incredibly supportive, even as my phone was crashing I finally realized the problem wasn’t mine alone but rather a problem that the entire field was struggling to answer. At the Scholars’ Lab, I’ve tried to create some solutions, piloting more intensive training in coding for graduate fellows. But still I worry about this problem, especially for scholars like me, at universities with less established DH infrastructure where funding is limited and expert guidance even more so. How can we democratize access to the skills needed to do more ambitious and experimental digital humanities? How can we support researchers at all stages of their careers and in all sorts of institutional contexts to undertake the DH research they envision? How can we make the labor involved in both this teaching and learning more visible and valued across the humanities?
If elected to the ACH executive, my goal would be to try and start building solutions to these problems. I realize these are big questions, but I strongly believe that ACH is one of the few professional societies that can actually produce meaningful change in these areas. In particular, I believe the ACH is more than a professional society, it is a community committed to distributive justice, inclusivity, and experimentation in the humanities, and I would be honored to serve this community and mission. Some concrete initiatives I would hope to pilot include trying to develop more opportunities for advanced training in computational and experimental digital humanities. I would also like to explore possibilities for connecting researchers at different stages and institutions so that DH expertise is shared beyond particular campuses. As a DH developer, I believe ACH could provide a much needed venue for discussions about software development in our field, and also help encourage collaboration between developers. Finally, I would like to harness some of the energy of the now classic DH twitter threads (like the one I posted) to craft ACH white papers and blog posts, whether on topics like DH labor practices or sustainability, so that we as field can start tackling these problems and building solutions.
Brad Rittenhouse
Bio statement
I am currently the Lab Coordinator of the DILAC Lab at Georgia Tech, and received my degree in C19 American Literature. I work on both the qualitative and quantitative ends, but most of it hews toward the idea of information management logics at work in literary aesthetics. My most recent article, entitled “TMI: The Data Management Aesthetics of Melville and Whitman,” appears in ESQ, and I’m presently working on several quantitative projects as well. Most of my administrative work aims at building DH at the local, state, and regional level through the creation of collaborations, projects, and formal organizations. I am also involved at the foundational level with several Southeast and Atlanta-based DH initiatives, and am excited to use a position on the ACH Executive Council to pursue these efforts at an even larger scale.
Candidate statement
In my present position, I have had the opportunity to facilitate a wide variety of projects that fall outside what I have come to call the “traditional digital humanities.” While many in ACH come from traditional humanities disciplines, my lab and other emerging spaces evidence a growing interest across the university in humanistic analyses and applications of technology. As a humanities makerspace at a technical institution, my lab and I collaborate broadly with colleagues and students in engineering, computer science, high-powered computing, digital civics and public policy, HCI and design, and other disciplines often kept at arm’s length in the digital humanities community. As a part of the Council I would promote this “even bigger tent” approach to DH, bringing in colleagues and collaborators to participate in humanistic research who might otherwise be skeptical of our work, or of whom we ourselves might be suspicious.
Primarily teaching first-year undergraduates and curious but uninitiated faculty, I’m very invested in creating low/no tech approaches to that provide an unintimidating introduction to digital work for novices, and also help them to build technical and critical thinking skills applicable in a wide range of disciplines and career paths. I believe DH is best when it involves the widest variety of people, and I want to prioritize approaches that engage with people of all levels of technical skill and disciplinary commitment.
While my qualitative work focuses on Melville and Whitman as a case study, my digital work looks to sidestep critical biases that lionize these and other white male writers by quantifying the style of encyclopedic writing in a way that includes non-white, non-masculinist themes and aesthetics. I’m perhaps most excited about the possibilities DH presents for designing research that moves beyond the canon and facilitates an inclusive ethic at scale. As a member of the ACH Executive Council, I would promote critical work that uses digital systems to promote social justice and inclusion.
Andie Silva
Bio statement
Andie Silva is Assistant Professor of English at York College (CUNY). At York, she started a new interdisciplinary minor in Digital Studies and designed the minor’s foundational course, “Technologies of Reading.” She has recently been appointed as a faculty member in the CUNY Graduate Center’s Master in Digital Humanities program. She is currently co-editing (with Scott Schofield, Huron College, UWestern Ontario) a collection on digital pedagogy in early modern studies, forthcoming with Iter Press and the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (ACMRS). Her forthcoming monograph, The Brand of Print: Marketing Paratexts in the Early English Book Trade (Brill) and its companion database, Printed Paratexts Online, will be published in 2019. She has published her research in the History of European Ideas, the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, and Changing English, and also has a co-authored article in Shakespeare’s Language in Digital Media: Old Words, New Tools (Routledge, 2017). She is also a member of the NYC Digital Humanities Steering Committee.
Candidate statement
I’m honored to be considered for a position in the ACH Executive Council. While debates surrounding diversity, inclusivity, and citizenship are crucial and increasingly urgent, they must be followed by concrete action. The field of digital humanities in particular must make conscious efforts toward fostering inclusive and representative spaces if it is to avoid replicating the colonialist structures that underpin so much of academia. It is the responsibility of executive councils to lead by example, ensuring that we remain mindful of inclusivity and strive to make the organization’s members and their work visible. In addition to reaching across ranks and institutions, this also means inviting and supporting scholars across communities and at the various intersections of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, ability, and neurodiversity. I would like to help the ACH promote the increased visibility of minoritized voices and of those in marginalized or contingent positions by ensuring representation in our conferences, journal publications, and awards. Furthermore, as someone who is deeply committed to pedagogy and public scholarship, I’m interested in making student work counted and valued. This includes, for instance, encouraging and supporting conference proposals that credit and ideally invite graduate and undergraduate student contributions and collaborations. I would like to help strengthen DH community ties across under-funded and under-represented institutions, helping build workshops and offer mentoring and funding opportunities to better train faculty and students interested in digital scholarship.
Questions about the ACH, the 2019 election, or our nominations process may be sent to secretary@ach.org.
Hi, have ballots been sent out for voting on these elections?