The ACH Nominations Committee is pleased to share the slate of nineteen nominees for the 2023 elections.
The voting period will begin on February 27 at 12:00 am (GMT-5) and continue until March 12 at 11:59 pm (GMT-5). In order to vote, you need to go to members.ach.org, click on “membership,” then on login. You’ll be prompted to log in to your WordPress account for ACH. You then need to visit members.ach.org, click on “membership” then click on “ACH Elections,” and click again on the link to the ballot. An announcement of election results will follow.
Executive Council
Stefka Hristova
Bio: Dr. Stefka Hristova (she/her/hers) is an Associate Professor of Digital Media at Michigan Technological University. She holds a PhD in Visual Studies with an emphasis on Critical Theory from the University of California, Irvine. Her research analyzes digital and algorithmic visual culture. She is the lead editor for Algorithmic Culture: How Big Data and Artificial Intelligence are Transforming Everyday Life (Lexington Books, 2021) and the author of Proto-Algorithmic War: How the Iraq War Became a Laboratory for Algorithmic Logics (Palgrave 2022).
Statement: I am interested in serving on the ACH Executive Council and advancing the transdisciplinary collaborations that this organization fosters. As everyday life is increasingly shaped by algorithmic technologies, a collaborative inquiry is becoming a necessity. I would like to help facilitate sessions for exploratory networked scholarship that can function as incubators for research projects. Low-stake networking events could broaden participation in digital humanities as well as critical algorithmic studies for scholars who might be interested in exploring such methods but feel intimidated by engaging with computational methods. Workshops, research escalators, mentorships, and collaborator recommendations might be worth exploring as ways to allow for broader transdisciplinary engagement. I believe that the multidisciplinary perspectives reflected in the work ACH position this organization to continue to be a leading hub for such work, and am excited for the opportunity to contribute to its success.
Dorothy Berry
Bio: Dorothy Berry is the Digital Curator at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. She received an MA in Folklore and Ethnomusicology, and a Master of Library Science from Indiana University. Her work engages with the discovery of African American history in archival and digital contents. She has been recognized with both a Library Journal “Movers and Shakers” award and the Society of American Archivists’ “Mark A. Greene Emerging Leader” award. Her work can be seen in up//root, JSTOR Daily, The Public Domain Review, and Lapham’s Quarterly.
Statement: I am interested in contributing to ongoing work with ACH to ensure that digital humanities maintains its connection to humanity, through respect for diverse subjects and ethical use of data. Coming from a background in archives and special collections, I am particularly interested in ways ACH can serve to better promote collaboration across departments, disciplines, and institutions. I believe, as a member of the Executive Committee, I can contribute insights from working in different digital positions across GLAM institutions, as well as planning experience from committee and programming work with the Digital Library Federation, the Society of American Archivists, and the Bibliographic Society of America. Beyond those contributions, I am excited by the possibilities of working with colleagues from across the field to create better conditions for the creation of innovative digital research, curation, and interpretation.
Eleni Bozia
Bio: Dr. Eleni Bozia is an Associate Professor of Classics and Digital Humanities at the University of Florida. Bozia holds two doctoral degrees: a Ph.D. in Classics Studies and a Dr. phil. in Digital Humanities. She is the Associate Director of the Digital Epigraphy and Archaeology Project and the founder and Head of the Data-Driven Humanities Research Group. Bozia studies diversity in Greek and Latin literature and its intersection with modern globalism. Also, she promotes the collaboration between the humanities and the sciences and is a pioneer in applying AI to the humanities. Bozia has received multiple grants. She has also published widely and delivered talks on issues of identity, otherness, and belonging in literature, computational linguistics, and the digital preservation of world heritage.
Statement: I am honored to be nominated to serve as an Executive Council Representative. I consider dh to be the quintessential means to collaborative mentality and equity in education. So, I would like to build more bridges between the humanities and sciences to enhance research and pedagogical practices. In addition, I plan to explore the possibility of partnering with other dh associations and related fields worldwide. I firmly believe that DEI work starts by addressing local needs, but change will be more impactful and lasting if we work together and support each other as one global community. Also, I am devoted to using technology to create equity in the academia and beyond by engaging and partnering with local communities. Thus far, I have co-founded and chaired the Digital Humanities Certificate at UF and co-founded and co-ran the Sunoikisis Digital Classics Consortium. I have served on the Executive Council of the Florida DH Consortium, as the Chair of the Diversity Committee at the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and as the co-Chair of the General Education Diversity Taskforce. So, I look forward to building on these experiences and working with the ACH to promote equity and excellence.
Jason Heppler
Bio: Jason A. Heppler is a historian and senior developer at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. He writes and works on data visualization, information design, web and digital history software development, and is an environmental historian of twentieth-century North America. He is the co-editor of Digital Community Engagement: Partnering Communities with the Academy (Univ of Cincinnati Press, 2020) and is completing a book on the environmental history of Silicon Valley for the Univ of Oklahoma Press. He is the former organizer and co-founder of Endangered Data Week, collaborative effort coordinated across campuses, nonprofits, libraries, citizen science initiatives, community activist groups, and cultural heritage institutions to foster an environment of data consciousness. He holds a PhD from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (2016) and has previously worked for the University of Nebraska at Omaha Libraries and Stanford University.
Statement: It is an honor to be nominated for the ACH Council and I am thrilled at the opportunity to stand for election. My background includes a range of academic technology roles and mentoring in DH-focused careers and open-source projects, including with the Mozilla Foundation and DLF. I am particularly interested in how institutions are addressing current and future challenge in the face of the climate emergency. I’m thrilled to see ACH’s decision to adopt hybrid/online conferences as a more sustainable model and hope to continue advocating for environmentally sustainable avenues for our work. I am confident that my experiences in software development, project management, public engagement, and technical mentorship would be valuable assets to the ACH Council.
Ravynn K. Stringfield
Bio: Ravynn K. Stringfield is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the University of Richmond’s Rhetoric and Communication Studies Department. She earned her Ph.D. in American Studies from William & Mary in 2022; during that time, she authored and edited the collective blog, Black Girl Does Grad School. Her teaching and research focus around new media studies, specifically Black women and girls’ creative expression in digital media. She has published in Digital Humanities Quarterly and has an essay in the 2021 Alternative Historiographies of the Digital Humanities, which was awarded the 2022 American Studies Association Digital Humanities Book Award.
Statement: I want to express my gratitude for this nomination and my enthusiasm for pursuing election. Digital humanities practitioners have continually made space for me in academia and it is my hope to continue showing those who work in the margins and who have a love of technology that their work can flourish here. I would look forward to being able to connect the ACH Executive Committee with the work of the American Studies Association Digital Humanities Caucus, where I currently serve as Vice Chair. It is my hope to bring creativity and advocacy for a myriad of different digital projects, pedagogy and theory that may have been previously overlooked. This appreciation for experimentation and an eye toward the margin in DH is what keeps me inspired and ready to work.
John Russell
Bio: John Russell is Digital Humanities Librarian and Associate Director of the Center for Virtual/Material Studies at Pennsylvania State University. He is a member of an interdisciplinary research team using computer vision to study realism in 19th century art that has received two Digital Humanities Advancement Grants from the National Endowment of the Humanities. John has been affiliated with dh+lib since 2014, first as a contributing editor and then, since 2018, as an Editor-in-Chief.
Statement: I am excited about the opportunity to serve the ACH community as a member of the Executive Board and to continue the work that current and past officers and council members have done to support an inclusive and justice-oriented vision for the association and for DH more broadly. I am also interested in pursuing greater connections between ACH and the digital art history community and working to imagine a more formal home for digitally-engaged humanities librarians within ACH.
Saniya Irfan
Bio: I graduated from the esteemed Department of English at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. Currently, I’m a PhD scholar at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi. I’m interested in Urdu literary traditions and Performance Aesthetics, Digital Humanities, Corpus Linguistics and Islamic political history and thought. I was also a summer research project fellow at the Michigan State University and part of the Ministry of Education sponsored SPARC project, ‘Digital Apprehensions of Indian Poetics’ at Jamia Millia Islamia. I am working in Urdu Corpus Linguistics and NLP tools as a part of my PhD project.
Statement: There are a handful of Indian institutes which offer only certificate courses in Digital Humanities. The discipline is still in its nascent stage and is yet to make its space within literary scholarship in India. The institutional resistance to fund DH, fewer trainings, workshops, people, collaborations, lack of infrastructural support are some of the hurdles that DH scholars face in India. I believe that I should be a part of the Executive Council of ACH because I wish to introduce DH to a wider South Asian student community, especially the newly emerging, by making them aware of the new trends and also speaking on their behalf to the outside community at large. I’m also a part of an institute which has a great supporting team of engineers to work in computer vision, NLP and allied areas, giving an opportunity for collaborations outside Humanities department.
Estelle Guéville
Bio: Estelle is a French curator and researcher currently pursuing her PhD in Medieval Studies at Yale. She previously worked for cultural institutions in France and the Gulf, including the Louvre Abu Dhabi where she developed digital research. She participates in several DH projects and is the co-creator of the Paris Bible Project, a digital humanities initiative studying abbreviations and special letter forms as markers of scribal practices. In her dissertation, she aims to recover the history of medieval female scribes, using both traditional and digital methods of history and art history. At Yale, she co-created the Graduate Digital Humanities Colloquium, a working group bringing together graduate students across disciplines to explore how digital tools can offer new possibilities in humanistic inquiry.
Statement: If elected to the ACH Executive Council, I am committed to helping build a strong community, which includes graduate students as well as practitioners from the GLAM sector working with digital and computational methods. I will actively participate in the organization of existing initiatives, such as the ACH’s conference while developing innovative ideas to support the academic and professional development of graduate students. Active mentoring, networking and technical training are some of the main topics I wish to focus on if I am elected. Using my experience in both cultural institutions and academic environments, I can help bridge the gap between academic and non-academic communities by implementing initiatives bringing together Digital Humanities and Public Humanities. I also wish to promote a supportive, creative, and sustainable environment where everyone can thrive and develop new projects. My international experience helped me build proficiency in project management, leadership, communication and education, an expertise I wish to make available to the ACH community to support its multiple projects and their development.
Lauren Klein
Bio: Lauren Klein is Winship Distinguished Research Professor and Associate Professor in the departments of Quantitative Theory & Methods and English at Emory University, where she also directs the Digital Humanities Lab. Before arriving at Emory, she worked in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech. She is the author of An Archive of Taste: Race and Eating in the Early United States (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) and, with Catherine D’Ignazio, Data Feminism (MIT Press, 2020). With Matthew K. Gold, she edits Debates in the Digital Humanities, a hybrid print-digital publication stream that explores debates in the field as they emerge.
Statement: It’s an honor to be nominated to run for membership in the ACH Executive Council, since ACH is so clearly charting a capacious and inclusive vision for the future of the field. If elected, I would look to bring my 15+ years of experience in DH to ACH, along with a continued commitment to listen and learn from emerging DHers. With continued attacks on public higher education, and on the teaching of race and racism in particular, the stakes of our work could not be higher. As a member of the ACH Executive Council, I would look to ally ACH with other scholarly organizations that are mobilizing against these attacks, while supporting ACH initiatives that model how a commitment to public and antiracist scholarship, to diversity of all forms, and to collaboration and labor equity, might open up alternate paths for the future.
Carrie Johnston
Bio: Carrie Johnston is the Digital Humanities Research Designer at Wake Forest University’s Z. Smith Reynolds Library, where she collaborates with researchers across disciplines to develop scholarly digital projects through humanistic inquiry. Her research and teaching consider the ways that technology has historically informed women’s literary labor, and her work has appeared in Amerikastudien / American Studies, American Quarterly, College Literature and Studies in the Novel. She holds a PhD in English literature from Southern Methodist University.
Statement: Digital humanities provides a starting place for things that are often overlooked or outright suppressed in higher education, including interdisciplinary research, community engagement, and awareness of unfair labor practices both in and outside of the academy. To that end, my entry point into DH is the humanistic inquiry that I believe is required for an equitable, nuanced, and justice-oriented approach to teaching, learning, and working. As a member of the ACH Executive Council, I would apply these values to cultivate a robust and inclusive DH community and to continue the crucial advocacy work of the ACH.
Jeri E. Wieringa
Bio: Jeri Wieringa is a Digital Historian and Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama. She is also the Director of the REL Digital Lab, a digital humanities lab supporting research and teaching in the Department of Religious Studies. She focuses on data curation, machine learning, and natural language processing with historical sources. She considers issues of AI ethics and the intersection of historical methods, focused on context and complexity, and the building of large-scale computational models.
Statement: As a scholar working at the intersection of computational tools and the historical study of religion, ACH has long been my primary academic home. If elected, I will work on issues of advocacy and infrastructure for supporting digital scholarship in the humanities. Informed by my experiences at the University of Alabama, the George Mason University Libraries, and with submitting a digital dissertation, I approach questions of infrastructure in terms of the multiple layers of support needed for digital scholarship to thrive, from training and development support to publishing outlets and repository systems capable of supporting complex digital artifacts. I would use this opportunity to identify and address obstacles limiting the creation of digital projects, with the view that supporting junior and emerging digital scholars requires increased institutional support for digital scholarship generally. I look forward to joining the ACH Council in supporting the development, publication, and preservation of digital scholarship.
Amanda Madden
Bio: Amanda Madden is Assistant Professor of History and Director of Geospatial History at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, George Mason University. Her current research focuses on the spatial intersections between violence and the state and her more DH-focused research interests include pedagogy of DH, open scholarship, digital and multimedia publication. Director of the digital humanities minor at GMU, she teaches DH courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels. She is the collaborator on several spatial projects and hopes to create more freely available resources for learning the tools of digital spatial humanities.
Statement: Before getting a tenure-track position in the digital humanities, I worked as an adjunct, a postdoc, and a research scientist but often had limited access to resources, including funding, software, tools, and formal training. Due to my unusual career path and reliance on what I was able to cobble together before my current position, I am conscious of the challenges faced by contingent faculty, faculty at under-resourced institutions, graduate students, and undergrads who have limited access to resources. As I become a mentor, I’m committed to ensuring what justice and equity I can and ensuring that the digital humanities doesn’t become another field with high barriers to entry reliant on an exploited class who receive little credit for their contributions. I see ACH as critical to mentorship, fostering partnerships, working for recognition of the marginalized, and keeping the digital humanities sustainable in the long term in ethical ways.
Valiur Rahaman
Bio: Prof. Valiur Rahaman is Associate Professor of English at Lovely Professional University Punjab, India. He holds a PhD in Jacques Derrida Studies and is a passionate digital humanist. He teaches Literary Theory, English Poetry, Digital Humanities (Text Analysis, Archiving and HITS). He was the chief investigator of a CRS project on “Humanities Inspired Computation” under NPIU-MHRD. He authored many books and articles. His recent book is Big Data Analysis in Cognitive Social Media and Literary Texts (Springer 2021). His last invited talk on “digital education” was delivered at NITTTR Chandigarh, India.
Statement: I am fascinated by ADHO and ACH. I am a passionate DHian, wish to contribute some DH efforts to accelerate ACH mission in global south too. I volunteer the ADHO activities and chose ACH membership because I wish to work with valued members to let attain DH activities in all the departments of humanities and social sciences of the country supplementing new areas of thinking. I know its contribution to preserving humanities and any advanced intersectional disciplines. In my forthcoming works are Digital Humanities Teaching (2023 Springer), “Indigenous AI”, and “Digital Female Misprision And Suicidology: A Data Feminist Approach”, “Decolonizing Web Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence in Education”, an effort is made towards save humanities save people, countries, and its allied beings including nature, culture, and global fraternity boycotting racism of any kinds. If elected, I am willing to serve the positions for international collaborative research, publication, editorial, and other outreach academic, and research growth where lesser-known scholars to DH will be newly networked (esp. from India) with ADHO-ACH. Keeping all these thoughts, I initiated plans to develop six new DH courses for undergraduate program, and conducted a Faculty Development Program on Teaching and Curricular Design of Digital Humanities in June 2022 and conducted (as a convener) a short term course on Pedagogy and Text Analysis in Digital Humanities at LPU Punjab, India. I am directing supervision for Capstone project, Dissertation, and doctorate research in DH. My aim is to contribute by building ADHO-ACH global network of all lesser-known DH researchers with funded DH projects, if possible, because we must save human heritage, humans and posthuman beings without distortions of identities. I am thankful ACH for giving me an opportunity to nominate myself. It reflects that ADHO+ACH is working for global social change and fraternity.
James Harr
Bio: James Harr (he/him) is an Assistant Professor of Literature and Languages at CBU (Christian Brothers University) in Memphis, Tennessee, an Instructor of Data Science at NC State University, and a lecturer for the Digital Humanities Summer Minor at UC Berkeley. His research interests include the digital archive, data ethics/representation, and data visualization practices. He’s currently President-Elect of the DH Collaborative of North Carolina and a regular contributor to the podcast, Coding Codices. His forthcoming chapter, “Infrastructures of Power: Archives as Epistemological Palimpsests,” will be included in Libraries, Archives, and the Digital Humanities, edited by Isabel Galina Russell and Glen Layne-Worthey.
Statement: As an early-career scholar, I have been heartened by ACH’s success in supporting historically marginalized and underrepresented scholarship. While I am unable to claim a life experience other than one of privilege, ACH has challenged me to reconsider academic opportunities that merely fill a CV line and instead reflect on ways I could contribute to ongoing efforts for inclusion in DH studies. I am proud to work at CBU, a Memphis-based liberal arts university, where principles such as “social justice,” “respect for all persons,” and “inclusive community” are in direct harmony with the fundamental beliefs of the ACH. As a member of the Executive Council, I would take what I have learned thus far at CBU (and in 10+ years teaching in the North Carolina Community College System) to center my efforts on outreach to smaller institutions with both developing DH programs and predominantly underrepresented student populations.
Joshua Ortiz Baco
Bio: Joshua Ortiz Baco is the Digital Scholarship Librarian and Assistant Professor at the Scholars’ Collaborative, University of Tennessee Libraries. He received his PhD in Iberian and Latin American Literatures and Cultures from the University of Texas, Austin. His research focuses on 19th century print culture of Latin American abolitionists and the applications of technology for the recovery and remediation of Caribbean and Brazilian diasporic periodicals. He is part of the editorial board for the journal Programming Historian en español and an advisory board member for the NEH funded Digital Library of the Caribbean: Open Educational Resources in Caribbean Studies.
Statement: My research, teaching, and outreach in DH has been shaped in innumerable ways by current and past members of the ACH. As a graduate student and now early career professional, I have also been fortunate to attend and organize events sponsored by the ACH that reflect my values. In particular, I am committed to supporting people representing and engaging with linguistic and racial diversity in knowledge production from under-resourced places. I believe that I can have an even greater impact through my participation in ACH sponsored activities for mentoring, training, and community gatherings. If elected, I would be thrilled to participate in the ongoing programs advancing student learning in multilingual DH as well as grants for groups in the global south.
Sylvia Fernández Quintanilla
Bio: Sylvia Fernández is an Assistant Professor in Public and Digital Humanities at the Interdisciplinary School of the College of Liberal and Fine Arts at the University of Texas at San Antonio. She received a PhD in Hispanic Studies with a graduate certificate in Women’s, Gender and Sexualities Studies and Spanish as a Heritage Language from the University of Houston. Her research, teaching and advocacy lie at the intersection of Digital Technologies and Infrastructures with TransBorder and Latina/e/o Literatures, Archives, Languages and Cultural Heritage, Transnational and Intersectional Gender and Feminicide Violences, Human Rights Social Movements and Translingual Public and Digital Humanities Knowledge Production. Fernández has been the creator and collaborator of warmly received bilingual public and digital transnational projects that bring about social justice change in the digital and analog cultural record through consciousness-raising at a local and global scale. She was the invited editor of the first special issue on “Borderlands Digital Humanities” with Reviews in DH Journal and has been published individually and co-authored various articles in Spanish and English.
Statement: I was introduced to the digital humanities as an area of theory, praxis and pedagogy that is open for interdisciplinary engagement to create impactful work in and out of academia and where I found a community of practitioners from a range of disciplines that welcome human inquiry, practices, methods and tools to ethically produce knowledge necessary for a better world. A lot of these encounters have been possible because of some of the ACH initiatives, such as conferences, travel bursaries, DH interviews, networking and mentorship programs that have been receptive and supportive of my work. As part of the ACH Executive Council, considering my trajectory in public and digital humanities in different parts of the world, primarily in the Global South and with underrepresented communities in the United States, I want to continue the efforts of past and present members that are pushing for an association where new scholars, community members, students find and create communal and collaborative spaces to engage in the production of knowledge across geographical borders beyond academia. Therefore, in this role I commit myself to create, support and promote social justice initiatives that foster non-hierarchical, multilingual, community-based and ethical practices in the use, development and application of humanities and digital technologies at a local and global level. It is my hope to take ACH to communities and with individuals that have much to share for the DH community to learn from.
Nickoal Eichmann-Kalwara
Bio: Nickoal Eichmann-Kalwara (she/her) a digital scholarship librarian at University of Colorado Boulder, in the Center for Research Data & Digital Scholarship, in which she offers humanities data curation and management support. Her work centers on historical recovery and archival justice, critical data literacies, and sustainable digital humanities infrastructures. She is a co-director of multiple DH projects and initiatives, including the Index of Digital Humanities Conferences and the Starkville Civil Rights project, and is the Outreach Editor at dh+lib Review. She has an MA in History from California State University, Fullerton, and an MLS from Indiana University’s School of Informatics.
Statement: Many thanks for the nomination! I’d like to serve on the ACH Executive Board in order to join and collaborate with a community of DH leaders who center care, equity, and justice in all of their work. I imagine I can offer expertise and time to develop publication and mentoring opportunities, as well as organize the annual conference. Most of all I hope to learn from and grow with our colleagues toward advancing ethical digital humanities and critical data pedagogy.
Meghan Ferriter
Bio: Meghan Ferriter (she/her) has collaborated with GLAMs, DH researchers, volunteers, and partners to implement impactful digital projects and transform participatory experiences. She supports iterative, human-centered outcomes by enabling practical knowledge exchange workshops, recommendations, and collaborative decision-making. Meghan launched and managed the Smithsonian Transcription Center and joined the Library of Congress to create the volunteer crowdsourcing program By the People. With LC Labs, she has investigated responsible machine learning and managed communications and digital experimentation. Meghan is Co-Investigator for the Collective Wisdom Project and Computing Cultural Heritage in the Cloud. She holds an M.A. (History) and Ph.D. (Sociology).
Statement: As an ACH Executive Council member, I hope to contribute to ACH activities that support practical professional development and connect expertise across domains in pursuit of equity and social transformation. In my career, I have pivoted to new fields and navigated intersections of scholarly inquiry and applied practice in different contexts. Each time, I spot and build out collaborative possibilities while chipping at organizational barriers. I would like to support others in finding opportunities within the challenges they face in their disciplines, to learn and expand approaches, and to take incremental steps toward change. I hope to bring my experiences developing early career experiences, scaffolding cohorts, supporting career transitions, and convening interdisciplinary expertise to support the sustained ACH effort to highlight and address structural barriers. I will share curiosity, compassion, and critical lenses in this role, while strengthening networks and catalyzing new collaborations. Thank you!
Jajwalya Karajgikar (Jaaj-wul-yah)
Bio: Jajwalya is the Applied Data Science Librarian with the Research Data and Digital Scholarship in the University of Pennsylvania Libraries. She assists researchers across all departments on campus and beyond on data analysis, machine learning, and digital pedagogy, with an implicit consideration for creative methods, ethical research, and data literacy. Her workshops include technical R, Python, and mapping plus informational sessions on Digital Humanities in different regions of the world. She is currently taking courses in South Asia to incorporate collections as data and digital projects. She serves as a co-facilitator for Penn Pan Asian Faculty and Staff Association.
Statement: As a former panelist on the ACH graduate mentorship working group, I learned of the group’s commitment to multi-faceted diverse research while also facilitating nuanced discussions. I hope to advocate for research that is multilingual and multidisciplinary. I want to celebrate the achievements of a computational community for early-career scholars. I believe ACH is at a place to support thoughtful and meaningful conversations that bring long-term, sustainable processes to the fold. As a member of the executive board, my priorities would be to organize tangible resources for researchers in alt-ac, whether on job-market discussions or on navigating work-place experiences.
Thank you for your nomination and consideration.