The ACH Nominations Committee is pleased to share the slate of nominees for the 2022 elections.
The voting period will begin March 1, 2022 and continue to March 15, 2022. An announcement of election results will follow.
Executive Council
Eduard Arriaga
Bio: Eduard Arriaga is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Global Languages and Cross-Cultural Studies at the University of Indianapolis. He holds a PhD in Hispanic Studies and Migration Studies from Western University (Canada). His teaching and research revolve around issues of race/ethnicity and digital production, digital humanities and knowledge production, and Afro-Latinx and Afro-Latin American cultural production. He is the author of several books and articles. His most recent book is Afro-Latinx Digital Connection (University Press of Florida 2021), a co-edited volume published with Andrés Villar. He is the director of Data in Humanities, a NEH/Indiana Humanities funded initiative.
Statement: I have been impressed by how the ACH has managed to bring together diverse stakeholders to discuss, study, advocate and support the digital humanities. I’d be really interested in becoming part of the Executive Council so I can serve as a bridge between the organization and other academic and non-academic communities that are thinking, employing and repurposing digital technologies. I am also invested to re-think the place human beings and human productions play in our current digital worlds. Likewise, with my experience in leadership, project development and management, I can bring fresh and innovative ideas to advocate for the digital humanities, support processes of mentoring to imagine professional paths for our members, and actively support the realization of ACH’s conference, among other engaging processes.
Alyssa Collins
Bio: Dr. Alyssa Collins an Assistant Professor of English and African American Studies at the University of South Carolina. She received her Ph.D. in English in 2019 from the University of Virginia. Her research focuses on the intersections of blackness, technology, posthumanism, and digital culture. She is currently working on her first book, Cellular Blackness: Octavia E. Butler’s Posthuman Ontologies which looks at representations of replicating black embodiment in science fiction. When it comes to digital humanities research, Collins is most interested in the social media practices of black communities and reading theses interactions as moments of archival embodiment. She looks at archives made organized by hashtags including their use and decay over time. Collins has worked on several collaborative digital projects including, public annotated mapping projects like “The Charlottesville Syllabus”, and web-scraping projects like “Twitterature: Methods and Metadata”, and “DASH-Amerikan: Keeping Up with the Social Media Ecologies of the Kardashians.”
Statement: I am very excited to be nominated for ACH Executive board! As a graduate student the work of ACH meant so much to me, supporting both my DH education, with travel support to DHSI, and allowing me to see some of the workings of an executive board through a summer fellowship. As a member of the executive board, I would be eager to work to support existing programs for graduate students and early scholars, as well as imagining additional moments and structures of support. Thank you for your consideration.
Landon Elkind
Bio: I am an Assistant Professor of Philosophy in the Political Science Department at Western Kentucky University. In 2018 I earned a Philosophy PhD and Mathematics MS from the University of Iowa. My interest in digital humanities originates from previous work on the Tractatus Map project, which visualized Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus like a subway system, shedding new light on the book’s hypertextual organization. Currently my digital humanities work seeks to extend similar visualization techniques to Principia Mathematica and to rewrite Principia using interactive proof assistants. And currently my philosophical work also argues for broader use of program applications to formalize arguments and reconstruct texts in doing history of philosophy. In true Texan fashion, I got started in philosophy by reading Plato’s Republic while on a road trip to Houston with my family.
Statement: I am interested in getting more involved in the ACH. This is partly because my research program will require a multi-year (really, career-long) engagement with computational applications in philosophy (and with fellow digital humanists). More importantly to me, after experiencing a terrifically positive remote conference and wonderfully helpful online mentoring events (thank you to the Mentoring Committee!), I want to pay it forward. In other academic societies I have served as treasurer (I still am treasurer of the Bertrand Russell Society), website manager, conference co-organizer, and membership committee chair. I am willing to help in whatever position I can be useful.
Liz Grumbach
Bio: Liz Grumbach is the Program Manager for Digital Humanities and Research for the Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics, an organization committed to exploring participatory strategies for ethical technological innovation, at Arizona State University. Liz serves on the Board of Directors for Digital Frontiers, a community of digital humanities scholars reimagining scholarly and interdisciplinary communication, and Zombified Media, a non-profit media organization producing educational podcasts, TV shows and academic crossover events to help humanity survive current and future crises. She is also a member of the Visionary Futures Collective, where she works in community to imagine and create a better future for higher ed. Her current research includes investigating community-based design methodologies to address algorithmic governance, as well as the formation of feminist, anti-racist digital cooperatives that actively engage with questions of labor and social justice. She has been active in the digital humanities community for over ten years, working as an academic professional in DH for organizations such as the Advanced Research Consortium, 18thConnect, HASTAC, and the ASU Institute for Humanities Research. Her work has been published in scholarly publications such as DHQ, Scholarly Research and Communication, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, and the Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage.
Statement: At this stage in my academic career, I’m most interested in serving communities that acknowledge and address the multiple crises and challenges that our profession and world are experiencing. If elected, I would tap into and bolster existing ACH committee structures, digital resources, and initiatives to build networks of care, advocacy, and direct action. The ACH community is already oriented towards addressing inequity and justice, and I would work to empower current/future members to collectively address emergent needs – like accessible, hybrid events, stable (yet, flexible) mentorship networks, and actions that directly support folks that have been historically excluded from the profession. I believe ACH is poised to make transformative change in higher education, and I would be honored to serve my digital humanities colleagues by bringing my expertise in community organizing, communications, and project management to the table – as well as my commitment to justice-oriented, non-hierarchical futures for DH.
Matthew Hannah
Bio: Matthew N. Hannah is an Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities in the School of Information Studies at Purdue University and a Fulbright Specialist to Morocco. He teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in digital scholarship and media studies, administers the graduate certificate in Digital Humanities, and oversees the DH Studio space at Purdue. His research focuses on text and network analysis and media studies, and his work has most recently appeared in First Monday, The Journal of Magazine Media, and Collection Management, and he has a chapter forthcoming in Debates in the Digital Humanities (2022).
Statement: As DH organizations advance social justice, we have yet to see coordinated organizational efforts to address the harms caused by economic austerity, labor inequalities, and institutional oppression. This lack of attention to neoliberal economic realities seems especially problematic given that economic austerity impacts people of color and women more dramatically. As a first-generation student from a working-class background, I want to address these challenges, advocating for digital humanists as workers. If elected to serve, I would work to establish a process by which professional organizations would draft official statements of solidarity with striking educational workers. I would also like to organize a worker’s caucus within ACH, raise funds to support labor actions, and find opportunities to interface with labor unions and other worker organizations. We cannot remain silent any longer on these issues as we bear witness to the horrific impacts of COVID-19 on the financial future of higher education.
Amanda Henrichs
Bio: Amanda Henrichs is a Coordinator of Instructional Design at Holyoke Community College. They received their PhD in 2016 and have published work in seventeenth-century studies and digital humanities. They have held DH postdocs at Indiana University and with the Five College Consortium in Western Massachusetts. Currently, they support community college faculty in a range of pedagogical efforts, including creating community in online courses, and digital humanities and creative work. Their current interests center on supporting graduate and contingent workers in academia; in 2017 they cowrote the Postdoctoral Laborer’s Bill of Rights. They are currently involved with the Visionary Futures Collective, a group of scholars working towards more just academic futures.
Statement: I am interested in serving on the ACH Executive Council because I want to be an integral part of the work the ACH does. I am most dedicated to supporting graduate and contingent workers in academia; I have been on multiple mentoring panels sponsored by ACH. Like many people, the pandemic taught me things: it taught me that organizations are made of people who make decisions, and every decision can make things better or worse. ACH is full of people making decisions to improve the world, one small step at a time. I’d like to be part of that work. Additionally, I’d like to build connections between my current work at a community college and the larger ACH community; I want to bring more community college perspectives into the discussion around computational and digital work.
Pamella Lach
Bio: Pamella R. Lach (she/her/hers) is the Digital Humanities Librarian at San Diego State University, which occupies the traditional lands of the Kumeyaay. She is Director of the Library’s Digital Humanities Center and Co-Director of SDSU’s Digital Humanities Initiative, a values-oriented network of scholars, teachers, and learners focused on critical digital inquiry, global diversity, and social justice. Pam’s work explores how new and emerging technologies transform humanistic scholarship and pedagogy. Her areas of interest include digital pedagogy, project management, surveillance, critical librarianship, and anti-racist digital humanities. As former chair of the Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Committee of the Digital Scholarship Section (DSS) in the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL) she helped develop DSS community agreements and the EDI Toolkit for Digital Scholarship. She leads a digital humanities institute on podcasting with the National Humanities Center, which has graduated nearly 300 doctoral students and faculty members since 2019. She has a PhD in U.S. Cultural History with an emphasis on gender and film history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a MS in Information Science from UNC’s School of Information and Library Science.
Statement: I am excited to serve on the Executive Council to assist in ACH’s work to advance racial justice through its governance structures while promoting ethical and just DH work throughout the field. These values align with my efforts to create a generous DH community at SDSU through a care-based, relational praxis grounded in anti-racism and social justice. I bring this same approach to my professional service, seeking opportunities to create non-oppressive spaces for professional and scholarly exchange. As a member of the ACH liaison committee since summer 2020 (representing West Coast DH), I joined a working-group to help develop a toolkit of Anti-Racist Technical Terminology. I am eager to build on these experiences as I become more involved with ACH. If elected to the Executive Council, I would continue to engage in values-based work as I support ACH in advancing just and ethical digital humanities.
Jim McGrath
Bio: Jim McGrath (he/his) is an Instructional Designer at Salem State University and a Faculty Associate in Arizona State University’s School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies. He was Public Humanities Lead on the Rhode Island COVID-19 Archive and Project Co-Director of Our Marathon: The Boston Bombing Digital Archive. Jim has written about digital humanities and public humanities for Doing Public Humanities (Routledge, 2020), Digital Humanities Quarterly, American Quarterly, and The Public Historian. Ugh. If you are not sick of Jim by now, you can learn more at his website or on Twitter @JimMc_Grath.
Statement: Thanks to whoever nominated me to stand for election. I am someone who has been variously precarious during my time in digital humanities and public humanities, working as a postdoc, an adjunct, a faculty associate. I have also been part of a digital scholarship team that resided in a library and I’m now an instructional designer in a Center for Teaching Innovation. I would love to hear more and work more with people in ACH who are not faculty, as well as those of us who are not tenured or tenure-track. I would like to reflect on why many of us may not be long for ACH due to challenging job markets, economic inequity, conflicting priorities, general exhaustion. I have long found ACH to be a force of good and I would hope to do that reputation proud while I am still here in this neck of the woods.
Katina Rogers
Bio: Katina Rogers is the author of Putting the Humanities PhD to Work: Thriving in and beyond the Classroom (Duke University Press, 2020). She is among those who made radical career changes during the pandemic, opting to start her own educational consultancy to help universities build more supportive and sustainable graduate programs. Her career has included work at The Graduate Center, CUNY (2014-2021), the Modern Language Association, the Scholarly Communication Institute, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. She has two young kids, significant racial and class privilege, and a deep frustration with higher education that is inextricably bound up with hope. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Statement: I am committed to developing creative, sustainable, and equitable systems for higher education—so much so that I recently left my job with CUNY in order to support institutions nationwide in their reform efforts. I am honored to stand for election to the ACH Council. For nearly fifteen years, I have worked in strategic roles in universities, foundations, and scholarly societies. As a systems thinker, this broad exposure has helped me to understand not only colleges and universities but also the network of infrastructure that supports them. Despite outward statements to the contrary, many nodes of this network operate under value systems that preserve and perpetuate inequality. I have a strong grounding in the most acute problems facing higher ed today—such as inequitable labor practices, racial injustice and other biases, and the dominance of the prestige economy—and I would bring this focus to my time as an ACH Council Representative.
Vice President/President Elect
Andrew Janco
Bio: Andy Janco is the Digital Scholarship Librarian at Haverford College. His work focuses on new methods for research in digital archives using natural language processing and computer vision. He is the co-director of an NEH Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities at Princeton University in partnership with the Library of Congress Labs and the European Union’s Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities (DARIAH). Andy received his PhD in Russian history from the University of Chicago and a master’s in library and information science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the ACH liaison to the Association for Slavic, Eastern European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) and serves on the organizing committee of KeystoneDH.
Candidate Statement: As Vice President, Andy would represent the views of contingent faculty, librarians, and graduate students. He would work to promote collaborative scholarship, digital research methods, and open knowledge among the ACH membership.
As vice president, I would promote three main ideas:
- Promoting engagement with digital humanists both inside and outside academia.
- Fostering conversations on ways that digital humanists can contribute to diverse open source communities.
- Build on existing initiatives for diversity and multilingualism among the ACH membership.
Lauren Tilton
Bio: Lauren Tilton is Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities at the University of Richmond. She has served on ACH since 2018 as a Council Representative, including roles on the Affiliates & Liaisons, Communications, Conference Coordinating, and Publications committees. She also leads ADHO’s Audiovisual in DH (AVinDH) Special Interesting Group (SIG). Her research focuses on visual culture and computer vision, receiving support from ACLS and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Along with directing the Distant Viewing Lab and Photogrammar, she has published in journals such as Digital Humanities Quarterly, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, and the Journal of Cultural Analytics. In addition to creating software such as the Distant Viewing Toolkit, she is the co-author of Humanities Data in R (Springer) and the forthcoming Debates in the Digital Humanities: Computational Humanities (Minnesota), Writing Their Voices (Stanford University Press), and Distant Viewing: Visual Culture at Scale (The MIT Press).
Statement: Shaped by the challenges and possibilities of the last years, a focus will be developing opportunities that support and amplify the capacious configuration of DH in the US. Several areas include:
- Continuing to experiment with online/hybrid conferences as a more affordable and accessible space for communities to share work and connect.
- Developing publication opportunities (broadly defined) attuned to the specific and expanding characteristics of DH scholarship such as form, topics, and time-to-publication.
- Building connections with colleagues and organizations in areas such as galleries, libraries, archives, and museums to better understand how ACH can support their work and develop more avenues for all members to be involved in shaping the organization.
My work is guided by a praxis that centers collaboration, openness, and experimentation as well as a desire to further ACH’s commitment to being an inclusive and anti-racist organization.