Speaker Biographies

Moya Bailey is an Assistant Professor in the department of Cultures, Societies, and Global Studies and the program in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Northeastern University. Her research focuses on marginalized groups’ use of digital media to promote social justice as acts of self-affirmation and health promotion. She is interested in how race, gender, and sexuality are represented in media and medicine. She currently curates the #transformDH Tumblr initiative in Digital Humanities. She is also the digital alchemist for the Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network.

Fiona Barnett is a Ph.D. candidate in the Literature Program and Women’s Studies at Duke University. She is committed to building a community around rethinking higher education for the 21st century and has worked at HASTAC [Humanities, Arts, Sciences, Technology Advanced Collaboratory] since 2009. As Director of the HASTAC Scholars program, she has organized over 30 major forums and projects on a diverse set of questions (pedagogical tools, disciplinary questions, research development, interdisciplinary projects, digital publishing, etc.) and has built a network of over 700 graduate & undergraduate students who actively blog, develop DH projects, create workshops and conference panels, and peer-review each others work. Her scholarly work is at the intersection of science and technology studies, feminist and queer theory, critical theory and visual studies.

Samantha Callaghan is a Māori (Indigenous New Zealander) of Te Whānau a Apanui, Ngāti Kahungunu and Pākehā descent. She is the Metadata Analyst for the Georgian Papers Programme, an ambitious transatlantic project contributed to by King's College London, Royal Collections Trust, College of William and Mary, Omohundro Institute, the Sons of the American Revolution, the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association, and King's Digital Lab. Samantha has an MLIS and received her training in the field of digitization through her work at the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre. While there she taught sessions on digitization and Mātauranga Māori for the MLIS digitization paper. She has worked on a large variety of digitization projects, large and small, both in NZ and in the UK. She has written or co-written articles around interlibrary loan, digitization and Mātauranga Māori, digitization in small institutions and orphan work licensing schemes.

Erica Cavanaugh is a Research editor at the Washington Papers and the Project Developer at Center for Digital Editing, both at the University of Virginia. Previously, she has worked for the Dolley Madison Digital Edition as well as Rotunda, the digital imprint of the University of Virginia Press. Erica’s work centers around making historical documents accessible and understandable through the use of open source tools and platforms. She has co-taught courses at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute titled Creating and Conceptualizing Digital Editions and Drupal for Digital Humanities Projects.

Marcia Chatelain is an Associate Professor of History and African American Studies at Georgetown University. The author of South Side Girls: Growing up in the Great Migration (Duke University Press, 2015), Chatelain is a public voice on the history of African American children, race in America, as well as social movements. In 2014, Chatelain organized her fellow scholars in a social media response to the crisis in Ferguson, Missouri, entitled #FergusonSyllabus. #FergusonSyllabus has led to similar initiatives online and has shaped curricular projects in K-12 settings, as well as academia. Chatelain hosts, “Office Hours: A Podcast,” in which she talks to millennials about what is most important to them. In 2016, Chatelain was named a “Top Influencer in Higher Education,” by The Chronicle of Higher Education. She has also been the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C. and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow.

P. Gabrielle Foreman is the Ned B. Allen Professor of English and Professor of History and Africana Studies at the University of Delaware. She has published extensively on issues of race and reform in the nineteenth century with a focus on the past's continuing hold on the world we inhabit today. She is the author of several widely known books and editions including Activist Sentiments: Reading Black Women in the Nineteenth Century and the Penguin edition of Our Nig: or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black. A collaboration with poets, choreographers and composers transformed Foreman's research into a Harriet Wilson performance piece that has been adopted in classrooms across the country and viewed by thousands online. Foreman has been a Kellogg National Leadership Program fellow, a fellow at the National Humanities Center and the Huntington Library, among others. As a Ford Foundation Fellow, she provides mentorship for emerging and mid-career faculty of color across disciplines and institutions. She co-founded Action for Social Change and Youth Empowerment (AScHAYE) which provided in-depth training to cohorts of young people who then took seats on the Boards of Directors of leading California organizations whose work impacted youth. Foreman has a long-standing commitment to the intersection of digital technologies, race and the public humanities. She is the founding faculty director of the Colored Conventions Project, which since 2012 has made digitally available seven decades of Black political organizing. She is currently completing The Art of DisMemory: Historicizing Slavery in Print, Poetry and Material Culture and a co-edited volume called Colored Conventions in the Nineteenth-Century and the Digital Age.

Jessica Marie Johnson is an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and History at Johns Hopkins University. Her research interests include women, gender, and sexuality in the African diaspora; histories of slavery and the slave trade; and digital history and new media and has appeared or will appear in Slavery & Abolition, The Black Scholar, Debates in the Digital Humanities, and Meridians: Feminism, Race and Transnationalism. As a digital humanist, Johnson is interested in ways digital and social media disseminate and create historical narratives, in particular, comparative histories of slavery and people of African descent, and the power of radical media to create social change. In 2008, she founded African Diaspora, Ph.D., a blog highlighting scholars and scholarship in the field of Atlantic African diaspora history. Johnson continues to make media as a member of two collaborative projects: the LatiNegrxs Project, a Tumblr and community interrogating Afrxlatinidad from the lens of transformative justice; and the Queering Slavery Working Group which she co-organizes with Vanessa Holden (Michigan State). Johnson has two works in progress. One is a history of free women of African descent laboring, living, and traveling between eighteenth-century Senegal, Saint-Domingue, and Gulf Coast Louisiana. The second, in collaboration with Mark Anthony Neal (Duke University), is a compilation of work reading nineteenth-century black codes against present-day race coding and digital vernaculars of people of African descent. She’s the recipient of research fellowships and awards from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Gilder-Lehrman Institute, and the Richards Civil War Era Center and Africana Research Center at the Pennsylvania State University, and the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship Program in the Program in African American History at the Library Company of Philadelphia.

Elizabeth Losh is an Associate Professor in English and American Studies and Co-Director of the Equality Lab. She is the author of Virtualpolitik: An Electronic History of Government Media-Making in a Time of War, Scandal, Disaster, Miscommunication, and Mistakes, and The War on Learning, the co-author of Understanding Rhetoric, and editor of MOOCs and Their Afterlives.

Alexis Lothian is an Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. She researches and teaches at the intersections of queer theory, cultural studies, digital media, and speculative fiction. Her book, forthcoming from NYU Press, Old Futures: Speculative Fiction and Queer Possibility, explores alternative futures dreamed up by feminists, queers, and people of color in 20th- and 21st-century Britain and America—from feminist utopians to video remixers—in order to inquire into historical and political narratives that the seemingly transparent terminology of “the future” has obscured. She also works on new artistic forms that are emerging from fan communities, particularly digital remix video (vidding), especially as these forms engage critical readings of media texts and are used to participate in social justice activism. Her work has been published by International Journal of Cultural Studies, Cinema Journal, Camera Obscura, Social Text Periscope, and Journal of Digital Humanities, and the feminist science fiction publisher Aqueduct Press; in 2013, she edited a special issue of Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology on feminist science fiction.

Leisa Meyer is a Professor of History at William and Mary and Director of the Program in American Studies. She works in U.S. and American women's history, gender history, twentieth-century cultural history, and the history of sexuality. She is the author of Creating G.I. Jane: Sexuality and Power in the Women's Army Corps during World War II (1996). Her current project is a book on the history of sexuality in the United States since World War II tentatively titled, Knowing Sex. She was an associate editor for the Encyclopedia of American Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender History & Culture (Scribner's, 2003), serves on the editorial advisory board for the journal Minerva, and is an editor for the journal Feminist Studies. She directs the William and Mary LGBTIQ Research Project as a regional digital humanities initiative.

Kelli Moore is an Assistant Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. She examines the role of media technology in the production of legal and political knowledge. Her ethnographic research on courtroom mediation examines the role of the image in facilitating the performance of witness testimony in domestic violence cases. She is writing a monograph that draws on black feminist thought, legal philosophy and visual culture to analyze courtroom rhetorical practices/haptic customs within ongoing debates about the subject of trauma and helplessness, facilitated communication, feminist jurisprudence, visual literacy, “post-racial” embodiment and digitality. These debates form the basis of her second project, a study of the contribution of post-war black feminist literary criticism to contemporary media theory.

Robert K. Nelson is the director of the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond. His current research uses a text-mining technique called topic modeling to uncover themes and reveal historical patterns in massive amounts of text from the Civil War era. He is currently completing two projects from this research: a digital project that will publish and analyze multiple topic models of Civil War-era archives including the Richmond Daily Dispatch and the New York Times and an essay that analyzes these models to produce a comparative analysis of Union and Confederate nationalism and patriotism.

Angel David Nieves is a Visiting Associate Professor at Yale University and an Associate Professor at Hamilton College. As Co-Director of Hamilton’s Digital Humanities Initiative (DHi), he has raised over $2.7 million dollars in foundation and institutional support for digital humanities scholarship. He is also Research Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. He taught in the School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at the University of Maryland, College Park, from 2003-2008. Nieves’s scholarly work and community-based activism critically engage with issues of race and the built environment in cities across the Global South. His co-edited book “We Shall Independent Be:” African American Place-Making and the Struggle to Claim Space in the U.S. was published in 2008. He is completing a manuscript entitled, An Architecture of Education: African American Women Design the New South, with the University of Rochester Press (forthcoming, 2018). Nieves is also currently working on a new volume in the Debates in the Digital Humanities Series and on a special collaborative issue of American Quarterly (2018) on DH in the field of American Studies. He is co-editor (with Kim Gallon, Purdue) of a new book series at the University of Georgia Press, The Black Spatial Humanities: Theories, Methods, and Praxis in Digital Humanities.

Amanda Phillips is an Assistant Professor of English and Film and Media Studies at Georgetown University and the Co-Facilitator of the Digital Humanities Caucus of the American Studies Association. She writes about death, race, gender, and social justice in video games and the digital humanities. You can find her work in Queer Game Studies, Games and Culture, Digital Creativity, and Debates in the Digital Humanities.

Marisa Parham is a Professor of English at Amherst College, and directs the Immersive Reality Lab for the Humanities, which is a workgroup for digital and experimental humanities. She also serves as a faculty diversity and inclusion officer. Her current teaching and research projects focus on texts and technologies that problematize assumptions about time, space, and bodily materiality. She is particularly interested in how such terms share a history of increasing complexity in texts produced by African Americans, and how they also offer ways of thinking about intersectional approaches to digital humanities and technology studies. She is the author of Haunting and Displacement in African-American Literature and Culture, The African-American Student’s Guide to College, and is co-editor of Theorizing Glissant: Sites and Citations. She currently serves on the Board of Directors for the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities, and formerly served on the founding Board of Directors for the Amherst Cinema Arts Center. She is also a former director of the Five College Digital Humanities Initiative, serving Amherst, Hampshire, Mt. Holyoke, and Smith Colleges, and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

Roopika Risam is an Assistant Professor of English at Salem State University. Her research focuses on the untold stories and unheard voices in the digital cultural record, with an emphasis on postcolonial cultures and the African diaspora. Risam's monograph, Postcolonial Digital Humanities: Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy is under contract with Northwestern University Press and explores the productive intersections of postcolonial studies and digital humanities. Her digital projects include The Harlem Shadows Project, a critical edition of Claude McKay's poetry, and Social Justice and the Digital Humanities, a resource for digital project design. Risam's scholarship has recently appeared in Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016, First Monday, Digital Humanities Quarterly, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Ada, International Journal of E-Politics, Left History, and South Asian Review.

Stephen Robertson is Director of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, and Professor in the Department of History and Art History, at George Mason University. Since 2003, digital history has occupied a central place in his research, in the form of Digital Harlem, a site that integrates material from a diverse range of sources to produce maps that offer visualizations of the complexity of everyday life in the 1920s. The site formed part of a collaborative project involving colleagues at the University of Sydney. Digital Harlem won the American Historical Association’s inaugural Rosenzweig Prize for Innovation in Digital History and the American Library Association’s ABC-CLIO Digital History Prize in 2010. Robertson is the author of Crimes against Children: Sexual Violence and Legal Culture in New York City, 1880-1960, and co-author of Playing the Numbers: Gambling in Harlem Between the Wars, the first major study of numbers gambling, an enterprise central to African-American economic, social and cultural life in the 1920s and 1930s. He is currently working on a project on undercover investigators in American life from the Civil War to WW2, and collaborating with Shane White and Stephen Garton on Year of the Riot: Harlem 1935, an extension of Digital Harlem, and with Sean Takats on Tropy , software to allow researchers to organize and describe the digital photographs they take in archives.

James Smithies is Director of King’s Digital Lab and Deputy Director of eResearch at King’s College London. He was previously Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities at the University of Canterbury, Aotearoa-New Zealand. He has also worked in the government and commercial IT sectors. James has a doctorate in New Zealand History, and produces both traditional and digital research outputs. He has published in a wide variety of domains, from the history of literary criticism to the history of technology, and digital humanities. His monograph The Digital Humanities and the Digital Modern (Palgrave Macmillan) was published in 2017.

Catherine Knight Steele is an Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Maryland, College Park and a scholar of race, gender and media with specific focus on African American culture and discourse in traditional and new media. Her research has appeared in the Howard Journal of Communications and the book Intersectional Internet (S.U. Noble and B. Tynes Eds.) Her doctoral dissertation, Digital Barbershops, focused heavily on the black blogosphere and the politics of online counterpublics. She is currently working on a monograph about digital black feminism and new media technologies. Dr. Steele also serves as the first Project Director for the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funded College of Arts and Humanities grant, Synergies among Digital Humanities and African American History and Culture.

Lauren Tilton is an Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities in the Department of Rhetoric and Communication Studies at the University of Richmond. Her work focuses on the politics of representation in the United States, using approaches from the digital, public humanities. She directs Photogrammar, an interactive web-based platform for New Deal and World War II photography. Her current multimodal project entitled Participatory Media traces the history of collaborative and community-based media making in the 1960s. She is the co-author of Humanities Data in R (Springer, 2015). She is the Chair of the American Studies Association's Digital Humanities Caucus.

John Unsworth is the University Librarian and Dean of Libraries at the University of Virginia and a Professor in the English Department. He chaired the commission that produced “Our Cultural Commonwealth: The Report of the American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences” and was a co-editor of the recent volume A Companion to Digital Humanities.

Jacqueline Wernimont is an Assistant Professor at Arizona State University and an anti-racist, feminist scholar working toward greater justice in digital cultures. She writes about long histories of media and technology—particularly those that count and commemorate—and entanglements with archives and historiographic ways of knowing. She is a network weaver across humanities, arts, and sciences. This work includes co-Directing HASTAC and ASU’s Human Security Collaboratory. She also runs Nexus: A digital research co-op and is a fellow of the Global Security Institute.

Karin Wulf is a Professor of History at William and Mary and Director of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. Wulf has produced two collaborative editions, Milcah Martha Moore’s Book: A Commonplace Book from Revolutionary America (with Catherine Blecki, published by Penn State in 1997) and The Diary of Hannah Callender, 1758-1788 (with Susan Klepp, 2010). Her book, Not All Wives: Women of Colonial Philadelphia was published by Cornell University Press in 2000, and issued in paper by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2005. She is currently at work on a study of the relationship between genealogical practices and political culture: “Lineage: Genealogy and the Politics of Connection in British America, 1680-1820.”

Pamela Z is a San Francisco-based composer/performer and media artist who works primarily with voice, live electronic processing, sampled sound, and video. A pioneer of live digital looping techniques, she creates solo works combining experimental extended vocal techniques, operatic bel canto, found objects, text, digital processing, and wireless MIDI controllers that allow her to manipulate sound with physical gestures. In addition to her solo work, she has been commissioned to compose scores for dance, theatre, film, and new music chamber ensembles including Kronos Quartet and the Bang on a Can Allstars. Her large-scale multi-media works have been presented at venues including Theater Artaud and ODC in SanFrancisco, and The Kitchen in New York, and her media works have been presented in exhibitions at the Whitney Museum (NY) , the Diözesanmuseum (Cologne), and the Krannert Art Museum (IL). Her multi-media opera Wunderkabinet—inspired by the Museum of Jurassic Technology (co-composed with Matthew Brubeck) has been presented at The LAB Gallery (San Francisco), REDCAT (Disney Hall, Los Angeles), and Open Ears Festival, Toronto. Pamela Z has toured extensively throughout the US, Europe, and Japan. She has performed in numerous festivals including Bang on a Can at Lincoln Center (New York), Interlink (Japan), Other Minds (San Francisco), La Biennale di Venezia (Italy), and Pina Bausch Tanztheater Festival (Wuppertal, Germany). She is the recipient of numerous awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Doris Duke Artist Impact Award, the Creative Capital Fund, the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, The MAP Fund, the ASCAP Music Award, an Ars Electronica honorable mention, and the NEA and Japan/US Friendship Commission Fellowship.