Participants
Ryaan Ahmed
Ryaan Ahmed, Conference Host
Ryaan Ahmed is a Senior Research Engineer and the Associate Director of the Programs in Digital Humanities at MIT, where he manages the day-to-day operations and research activities of the Programs, with a particular focus on connecting faculty research in the humanities with student researchers from engineering fields. Outside of his work at MIT, Ryaan has been involved in a number of technology startups, most recently founding Artusi, a company creating interactive music theory workbooks and textbooks. As a musician specializing in the performance of Baroque opera, Ryaan has worked with the Boston Early Music Festival, Welsh National Opera, English Touring Opera, Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, and many other early music groups and opera companies. Ryaan holds a bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Harvard University and a master’s degree in Early Music from the Eastman School of Music, where he studied lute with Paul O’Dette and was supported by the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans.
Sana Aiyar
Sana Aiyar, Chair
Sana Aiyar is a historian of modern South Asia. She received her PhD from Harvard University in 2009 and held an Andrew Mellon postdoctoral fellowship at Johns Hopkins University in 2009-10. From 2010 to 2013 she was Assistant Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her broad research and teaching interests lie in the regional and transnational history of South Asia and South Asian diasporas, with a particular focus on colonial and postcolonial politics and society in the Indian Ocean. Her first book, Indians in Kenya: The Politics of Diaspora (Harvard University Press, 2015), explores the interracial and extraterritorial diasporic political consciousness of South Asians in Kenya from c. 1895 to 1968 who mediated constructions of racial and national identity across the Indian Ocean. Her research has appeared in several journals including the American Historical Review, AFRICA: Journal of the International African Institute, and Modern Asian Studies. Professor Aiyar is currently working on two projects. One is a study of the everyday encounters of African soldiers and South Asian civilians during the Second World War when over a hundred thousand military recruits from East and West Africa were stationed in India and Burma. The second, “India’s First Partition”, is an examination of migration, religious and ethnic politics, nationalism, and anticolonial activism across India and Burma in the 1930s.
Joshua Aldwinckle-Povey
Joshua Aldwinckle-Povey, Speaker
Joshua is a senior at Brandeis University, majoring in Anthropology and History, with a minor in German Studies. In his time at Brandeis, he has worked extensively with digital scholarship techniques in class projects and as part of Brandeis' Research Technology and Innovation department. He believes strongly in the power of digital scholarship and methods to produce innovative and exciting research, but also in the ways that digital-first research can embrace social justice and encourage change. His research interests include using digital methods across the humanities and social sciences and the ethics of implementing digital techniques in settings such as museums.
Nicole N. Aljoe
Nicole N. Aljoe, Speaker
Nicole N. Aljoe is Professor of English and Africana Studies at Northeastern University in Boston. She is co-Director of The Early Caribbean Digital Archive and Director the Early Black Boston Digital Almanac. She is author of Creole Testimonies: Slave Narratives from the British West Indies, 1709-1836 (Palgrave 2012) and co-editor of Journeys of the Slave Narrative in the Early Americas (UVA Press 2014) and A Literary History of the Early Anglophone Caribbean: Islands in the Stream (Palgrave/Springer 2018). Her essays have appeared in African American Review, American Literary History, Anthurium, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, and The Journal of Early American Literature.
Alison Babeu
Alison Babeu, Speaker
Alison Babeu has served as the digital librarian and research coordinator for the Perseus Project since 2004. Before coming to Perseus, she worked as a librarian at both the Harvard Business School and the Boston Public Library. She has a BA in History from Mount Holyoke College and a MLS from Simmons College. Wrangler of all things metadata, digital, classical, libraries and otherwise, her current research projects include planning for the curation and preservation of the Perseus Digital Library data, texts, and metadata in all its instantiations, and helping build new digital publishing venues to support the work of students and Perseus collaborators. In her nonexistent spare time, she enjoys hanging with the four mammals for which she is responsible (two kids, 1 cat, 1 dog), reading, baking, gardening and playing with Python.
Kristen Abbott Bennett
Kristen Abbott Bennett, Speaker
Kristen Abbott Bennett is an Assistant Professor of English and teaches Digital Humanities at Framingham State University. She is the Project Founder and Director of The Kit Marlowe Project, and Assistant Director of Pedagogy and Outreach for the Map of Early Modern London. She has published an edited collection of essays entitled Conversational Exchanges in Early Modern England (1549–1640), and recently edited and contributed to a Special Issue of Explorations in Renaissance Culture. Additionally, she has authored several essays discussing medieval and early modern literature, as well as complementary digital pedagogies in venues including Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme, Marlowe Studies: An Annual, and IDEAH (Interdisciplinary Digital Engagement in Arts and Humanities). Currently, she is under contract with Cambridge University Press for an Element entitled Teaching Shakespeare’s Theatre of the World, and with Oxford University Press as a contributing author for The Oxford Handbook of Thomas Nashe. She also has agreed (with enthusiasm) to edit and encode an edition of Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost for the New Internet Shakespeare Editions (University of Victoria).
Rahul Bhargava
Rahul Bhargava, Speaker
Rahul Bhargava (he/him) is an assistant professor at Northeastern University’s College of Art, Media, and Design; he’ll be presenting today on the data infrastructure for Media Cloud. He is an educator, researcher, designer, and facilitator who builds collaborative projects to interrogate our datafied society with a focus on rethinking participation and power in data processes.
Laura Braunstein
Laura Braunstein, Speaker
Laura Braunstein is the Head of Digital Scholarly Engagement at Dartmouth College, where she co-leads Digital by Dartmouth Library, the Library's digital collections program. She has a doctorate in English from Northwestern University, where she taught writing and literature classes. She is also a crossword puzzle constructor and co-founded The Inkubator, a project that publishes crosswords by women and non-binary puzzlemakers.
Crystal Brusch
Crystal Brusch, Speaker
Crystal Brusch (she, her) is the designer for Brown University Digital Publications within the Center for Digital Scholarship. She joined Brown in the fall of 2016 to help craft dynamic, web-based digital publications that support transmedia faculty research. Crystal's work focuses on digital design, interactive storytelling, user experience, and animation. Crystal holds a master's degree from New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program and prior roles in trade publishing, journalism, and public arts.
Ashley Champagne
Ashley Champagne, Speaker and Organizing Committee Member
Ashley Champagne is Director of the Center for Digital Scholarship (CDS), the University’s digital scholarship hub that provides inspiration, expertise, services, and teaching in digital scholarship methodologies, project development, and publication to Brown faculty, staff, and students. Dr. Champagne is also a Cogut Institute Lecturer in Humanities teaching courses in digital humanities and supporting the Doctoral Certificate Program in Digital Humanities. She is the Principal Investigator of the “New Frameworks to Preserve and Publish Born-Digital Art,” a project funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, and the co-Research Director on the “Stolen Relations: Recovering Stories of Indigenous Enslavement in the Americas” project, which is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Her work has appeared in Interdisciplinary Digital Engagement in Arts & Humanities, JMIR Infodemiology, ITHAKA S+R, Digital Humanities Now. Dr. Champagne earned her Ph.D. in English from University of California, Santa Barbara in 2018.
Catherine Clark
Catherine Clark, Conference Host
Catherine Clark is a historian of modern France and its visual cultures. She is Associate Professor of History and French Studies, Co-Chair of MIT’s Global France Seminar, and Faculty Director of the MIT Programs in Digital Humanities. Her research is largely concerned with how the visual produces knowledge: in the past, in contemporary historical practices, and with the implement of digital and computational image analysis. Her interest in visual culture and the city has led her to write about the histories of commercial street photography in France after 1945, the Vidéothèque de Paris, the production of Marco Ferreri’s 1974 film Touche pas à la femme blanche!/Don’t Touch the White Woman, shot in the destruction site of the former market pavilions at les Halles, as well as the history of dam-building in the Alps and the French TV show Les Revenants/The Returned (2012-2015). Clark has held residential fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France and been a visiting associate professor of visual culture and history at the California Institute of Technology. Her book Paris and the Cliché of History (Oxford University Press, 2018), a history of Paris’s photographic history, won the 2018-2019 Wylie Prize in French Cultural Studies.
Sarah Connell
Sarah Connell, Speaker
Sarah Connell is the Associate Director of the Women Writers Project and the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks at Northeastern University. Her research focuses on text encoding and computational text analysis, medieval and early modern literature, and pedagogies of digital scholarship. She teaches courses and workshops in the digital humanities and early English literature. Her current projects include Word Vectors for the Thoughtful Humanist, an NEH-funded seminar series on research and teaching with word embedding models, and “Representing Racial Identity in Early Women’s Writing,” a project examining discourses around race in the Women Writers Online collection.
Lana Cook
Lana Cook, Speaker
Lana Cook, Ph.D. is Associate Director of the Systems Awareness Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Her work explores the use of aesthetics and narrative forms to express emergent sensory, affective and cognitive awareness across individual, relational, and collective levels. She is working on a book project entitled “Psychedelic Breakthroughs.” Her work appears in Configurations (John Hopkins UP), Chacruna, Forced Migration Review (U of Oxford) and other venues. She has worked as a strategist at MIT Open Learning, incubating new initiatives in education, including the Refugee Action Hub (ReACT) and Emerging Talent programs. Cook earned a doctorate in English at Northeastern University, with a focus on contemporary American literature, cinema studies and visual culture, where she was a 2014 Humanities Center Fellow. She is a Certified Master Practitioner with the Center for Systems Awareness.
Matt Cook
Matt Cook, Speaker and Organizing Committee Member
Matt Cook is Digital Scholarship Program Manager at Harvard Library. In this role, Matt provides instruction, assists in the development of technology spaces, and leads efforts to digitize and explore heterogenous (i.e. text, artifacts, AV, etc.) material collections, at scale, while keeping “humans in the loop” through the use of augmented and virtual reality interfaces. As a researcher, Matt also studies the state and trajectory of digital scholarship generally, what it takes to manage exploratory teams in libraries, and the scholarly impact of new knowledge services related to physical fabrication and mindfulness. Find out more at mncook.net.
Paul Cote
Paul Cote, Speaker
Paul Cote is a Cambridge-based geographer with a long career in academia and practice. Paul earned a Master in City Planning degree from MIT in 1993. That year he became the Geographic information Systems (GIS) Specialist and Lecturer at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD). The GSD provided a wonderland of challenges related to exchanging information between 3D design tools used by architects with the contextual data and scalable information management capabilities of GIS. These challenges were the subject of a sequence of courses entitled Real Infrastructure for Virtual Cities conducted at the GSD over several years. While at the GSD, Paul built connections with the municipal GIS agencies of Cambridge and Boston, the Town of Brookline and the Harvard University planning office and local architecture firms -- with a view of cultivating a city modeling community across the Boston metro area. After leaving Harvard in 2013 Paul has continued to work with the municipal GIS agencies of Cambridge and Boston and with the local design and development community toward the development of an infrastructure and culture of city model development. Paul is also working with the Cambridge Historical Commission to digitize and georeference ten file cabinets of clippings, correspondence, and systematic architectural inventory data collected over several decades for every building in the city – The Cambridge Digital Architectural Survey and History (C-Dash). Based on the open-source Omeka-S platform, C-DASH will make these documents available through a map-based mobile interface.
Karilyn Crockett
Karilyn Crockett, Speaker
Elspeth Currie
Elspeth Currie, Speaker
Elspeth Currie is a PhD student in history at Boston College, where she studies women in early modern Europe and is currently finishing the Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities. She holds her BA in history and classical studies from Gordon College, and her MSt in women’s studies from the University of Oxford. Her master’s thesis studied matrilineal intellectual legacies in early modern England and the ways that learned mothers could influence their daughters’ education. Before starting her doctoral program, Elspeth worked in secondary education for several years, teaching English, ancient history, and Latin. This was a formative experience, and eventually, she hopes to make her career in teaching, either at the secondary or collegiate level. Taking graduate courses that incorporate digital humanities techniques has piqued her interest in the pedagogical potential of DH to better engage students in historical study. Since returning to academia, Elspeth has focused her research on classical reception in the early modern world. She is particularly interested in ways that non-normative subjects, especially women but also middling-status individuals, interacted with the classical world and crafted intellectual lives.
Daniel DeFraia
Daniel DeFraia, Speaker
Daniel DeFraia is a reporter and visiting professor at Emerson College where he teaches journalism history, media law and ethics, and reporting skills courses. His first book, “State Work: American Reporters and the Making of Modern Independent Journalism, 1890 – 1980,” examines how reporters served as hidden agents of national power through diplomacy, intelligence, war, empire, and domestic reform.
Hayden DelCiello
Hayden DelCiello, Speaker
Hayden DelCiello (he/him) is a second-year undergraduate student at Northeastern University studying computer science. Hayden is a current co-op with the Lazer Lab, who has handled the Twitter panel data management, internally, before working on this project to make that data more accessible, externally as well. Before this, he wrote simulation software for the Laboratory for Soft Tissue Biomechanics at Northeastern to study mechanical properties of the human iris in glaucoma patients.
Victoria Dey
Victoria Dey, Speaker
Victoria Dey graduated from the University of Rochester in the Spring 2021 with a dual degree in French and International Relations. She began the World History PhD in the Fall of 2021 with a focus on Black France. Her research interests include drawing parallels between Black conditions and Black protest in France and the United States.
Daniel Dougherty
Daniel Dougherty, Speaker
Daniel Dougherty is a Ph.D. candidate and teacher in the English Department at Boston College, where he has taught courses on world literature and Victorian literature. His research interests include radical form in the novel, Victorian literature, global modernisms, and folklore, with a specific emphasis on pedagogy of the novel and the Bildungsroman form. He emphasizes recently developing digital tools in his pedagogy and research.
Catherine Enwright
Catherine Enwright, Speaker
Catherine is a PhD candidate in English Literature at Boston College. She focuses on twentieth century literature, and is currently writing about connections between World War I literature and the Gothic tradition. Completing exams focused on World War I and modernism, she is interested in the relationship between literature and modern political and social crises and has taught courses on "The Literature and Culture of the First World War", "War Literature", and "Disaster Literature". Beyond these specific interests, Catherine enjoys reading a wide range of authors and has presented on Dickens, Hemingway, Eliot, David Jones, T.S. Eliot, D.W. Griffith and Abel Gance. She is also involved as an editor in a long-term digital humanities project with the David Jones Center and Cambridge University Digital Library to transcribe and encode David Jones' entire archive for public use. Outside of academic work, Catherine works for the Center for Digital Innovation and Learning as an Instructional Design Assistant, where she helps to create online graduate courses.
Jackie Erlon-Baurjan
Jackie Erlon-Baurjan, Speaker
Jackie is interested in how ecological context shapes our ideas of time and place within Central and Inner Asia. Her current research examines Soviet collectivization and its attendant policy in pastoral sedentarization, interrogating forms of indigenous resistance and movement in the contexts of structural violence or impossibility. Her research interests reside at the nexus of the making of the nation-state, ecology and violence to think about "more than human histories."
Kurt Fendt
Kurt Fendt, Chair
Kurt Fendt is Senior Lecturer in Comparative Media Studies/Writing and Director of the Active Archives initiative at MIT. Fendt teaches graduate and undergraduate subjects in Media Studies, Digital Humanities, and German Studies, including a new project-based course entitled “Expanding the Museum”. He has collaborated with museums and archives in the US and abroad on new formats for visitor engagement. Formerly the Executive Director of MIT’s HyperStudio for Digital Humanities, Fendt is Principal Investigator of the NEH-funded project, “Annotation Studio: Multimedia Annotation for Students” and several archive-based projects for research and education in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Fendt has held Visiting Professorships at the University of Cologne, the Technical University of Aachen, and the University of Klagenfurt, Austria. He was also Visiting Scientist at the Fraunhofer Institute in Sankt Augustin, Germany.
Julia Flanders
Julia Flanders, Speaker
Julia Flanders is a professor of the practice in English and the director of the Digital Scholarship Group in the Northeastern University Library. She also directs the Women Writers Project and serves as editor in chief of Digital Humanities Quarterly, an open-access, peer-reviewed online journal of digital humanities. She is the co-editor, with Neil Fraistat, of The Cambridge Companion to Textual Scholarship, and the co-editor, with Fotis Jannidis, of The Shape of Data in Digital Humanities: Modeling Texts and Text-based Resources (Routledge, 2019).
Jamie Folsom
Jamie Folsom, Speaker
Jamie Folsom is a Partner at Performant Software Solutions, an established software development agency with a focus on the Digital Humanities. He is a software development practitioner, consulting with scholars in a wide range of fields, managing technology projects with them, and collaboratively developing software tools to support their teaching and research. Previously, he was lead developer for Hyperstudio, center for the Digital Humanities at MIT, where he worked on projects including Annotation Studio and the Comédie Française Registers Project, among others. He holds a Bachelor's degree in French from Vassar College and a Master's degree in Technology, Innovation, and Education from Harvard University Graduate School of Education.
Adam Franklin-Lyons
Adam Franklin-Lyons, Speaker
Adam Franklin-Lyons is an associate professor of European History at Emerson College where he teaches courses on medieval history, music history, and cartography. His first book, "Shortage and Famine in the Late Medieval Crown of Aragon," (Penn State Press, 2022) argued for the importance of political and economic forces in shaping medieval food shortage. His current research focuses on the history of news in the late medieval period. He is also a member of the "Travelers Lab" research group at Wesleyan University that uses GIS mapping and other forms of visualization to reconsider medieval communication and mobility.
Taryn Gilligan
Taryn Gilligan, Speaker
Taryn Gilligan is a research associate at the Boston Research Center, a digital community history and archives lab based in the Northeastern University Library. Gilligan recently completed her master's degree in English (Rhetoric & Composition) along with a graduate degree certificate in Digital Humanities from Northeastern University. Gilligan's research focuses on the ways in which marginalized communities use various digital rhetorical and compositional practices as a form of self-expression, resistance, healing, and social activism. Her current research investigates the through line between digital personal narratives, community formation, and the creation of transmedia sociopolitical movements and subsequent sociocultural change. Alongside her academic work, Gilligan is also an artist, activist, and digital marketing consultant.
Abigail Gipson
Abigail Gipson, Speaker
Abigail Gipson graduated from Indiana University in 2019 with a degree in international studies. Her undergraduate research focused on music production and language revitalization in Tatarstan. After graduation, Abigail completed a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship in Izhevsk, Russia. She also has a background in communications and audio/video production. Her current research interests include literature of the Volga region, governance in the Russian Empire and the early Soviet Union, and language policy.
Jody Gordon
Jody Gordon, Speaker
Jody Gordon is an Associate Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences at Wentworth Institute of Technology and an Assistant Director of the Athienou Archaeological Project (Cyprus). He received his Ph.D. in Classical Archaeology from the Department of Classics at the University of Cincinnati where his dissertation involved an archaeological study of the effects of imperialism on local identities in Cyprus during the Hellenistic and Roman periods. In addition to working in Cyprus, Jody has excavated in Tunisia, Italy, Spain, and Greece. He is the co-author of "Mediterranean Archaeologies of Insularity in an Age of Globalization" (2020) as well as a number of articles and book chapters on Roman archaeology, cultural identity, ancient imperialism, and digital archaeology. At Wentworth, Jody teaches interdisciplinary classes situated at the intersection of inclusive excellence, technology, and high-value learning, such as History of Ancient Africa, Roman Culture and Technology, Ancient World Civilizations, and Computer Science and Society Studio.
Kasya O’Connor Grant
Kasya O’Connor Grant, Speaker
Kasya O’Connor Grant earned her B.A. in American Studies with a concentration in Education Policy from Kenyon College in 2016. She went on to spend several years as an educator before returning to school. Her research interests include the construction of public memory, identity, inherited trauma and violence, and how these concepts inform adolescent education.
Tieanna Graphenreed
Tieanna Graphenreed, Speaker
Tieanna Graphenreed is an English PhD student at Northeastern University studying rhetorics of Black citizenship and Black spatial politics. Tieanna’s research explores questions of rhetorical citizenship through lenses of writing studies and civic rhetorical education, critical geographies of race and space, and digital humanities. Her dissertation focuses on building a digital index and web-based learning resource focused on The Brownies’ Book and its import to U.S. Black education histories. Tieanna Grapheneed is Managing Editor for Reviews in Digital Humanities. While at Northeastern, Tieanna has worked on digital projects with the Early Caribbean Digital Archive (ECDA), Early Black Boston Digital Almanac (EBBDA), and Mapping Black London (MBL); she has also served as Assistant Director of the Writing Center, and developed and led workshops on various digital tools with the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks and the Digital Integration Teaching Initiative.Tieanna’s most recent article in Composition Studies, co-authored alongside Professor Mya Poe, engages writing assessment research to consider classroom ecologies and forward antiracist genres and antiracist assessment practices in the classroom.
Zhen Guo
Zhen Guo, Speaker
Zhen Guo (she/her) is a second-year PhD student at Northeastern University’s Network Science Institute. She is currently working on understanding Twitter follower networks and their relationships with users’ ideology. As for research, she is interested in political science on the online space. She has been working on creating the data visualizations for POTATO.
Warren Harding
Warren Harding, Speaker
Dr. Warren Harding (he, him) is the Diversity in Digital Publishing Postdoctoral Research Associate at Brown University Library. A writer and interdisciplinary scholar, Dr. Harding specializes in African diasporic literature, comparative Caribbean studies, Caribbean women’s writing; comparative Black feminist literary criticism; and migration and diaspora studies. He holds a Ph.D. in Africana Studies and A.M. in Comparative Literature from Brown University, and is working on his manuscript tentatively titled, "Migratory Reading: Black Caribbean Women Writers and the Work of Literary Cultures."
Ella Howard
Ella Howard, Speaker
Ella Howard, Ph.D., Associate Professor of History, teaches Digital History, Boston History, American History and American Studies. She is excited to be working on Wentworth's newest undergraduate major, Computer Science + Society, which will prepare students for a wide range of careers by training them to apply the skills of Computer Science, the Humanities, and Social Sciences to the problems of the world. Howard’s book Homeless: Poverty and Place (University of Pennsylvania, 2013) traced the history of New York City’s Bowery as a skid row. Her current research focuses on the history of historic preservation as a form of exclusionary zoning, exploring the ways it has furthered gentrification and segregation by race and class, and evaluating strategies for inclusive preservation. A 2019 Dianne Woest Fellowship from The Historic New Orleans Collection allowed her to carry out extended research in New Orleans, a city at the heart of her current project, along with Savannah and Charleston.
Melanie Hubbard
Melanie Hubbard, Speaker
Melanie Hubbard is the Head of Digital Scholarship and Data Services at Boston College Libraries. In addition to her twelve years in libraries, her background includes extensive experience in film production and post-production, visual design, and photography. Her primary disciplinary areas are English literature, film, and the history of the book.
Julia Hurley
Julia Hurley, Speaker
Julia Hurley (she, her) is a final-year doctoral student in Archaeology and the Mediterranean World at Brown University. She earned her M.Phil. from Cambridge University and her B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania. Her research uses novel digital methods to explore large-scale patterns in foodways in Iron Age and Roman-period Britain. She is broadly interested in the potential of digital humanities to illuminate the daily lives of understudied historical peoples. She has conducted fieldwork in England, Spain, France, Italy, Greece, Turkey, and, most recently, Morocco, leading digital survey and mapping for the Gardens of the Hesperides archaeological project. Julia has served in various roles within Brown University Digital Publications and the Center for Digital Scholarship since 2020, and is currently serving as the Digital Publications Proctor.
Sam Hurwitz
Sam Hurwitz, Speaker
Sam Hurwitz is a third year PhD student at the history department at Boston College. Sam's research interests concern Boston history, LGBTQ+ history and 20th century American history. Specifically, their dissertation will concern the multiracial, working-class history of gay men and women and the history of transgender women while also focusing on the interactions between the police and LGBTQ+ folks. They graduated from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 2017 with a degree in History. Sam started to become interested in Digital Humanities in the first year of their PhD program and obtained a certificate in Digital Humanities in May of 2022. After graduation, Sam would like to find employment in a DH related field. Currently, they are a Digital Humanities Program Assistant at Boston College’s O’Neill Library. They are eager in expanding their Digital Humanities skillset through projects such as this one. Sam believes that building their DH know-how will enable quicker access to digital scholarship and content, increase the public’s understanding of the local history of Boston and the history of the Boston’s LGBTQ+ communities and provide a framework for future scholars to further reveal how Boston’s queer and gender non-conforming populations have lived and survived over the years.
Katherine Ireland
Katherine Ireland, Speaker
Katherine Ireland is the Interim Head of the Digital Humanities Lab (DigiLab) at the University of Georgia, sponsored by the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts and located in the Main Library. She directs the DigiLab Team and supports various faculty and student-led interdisciplinary research and projects. She has published in the Journal of English Linguistics and The Southern Journal of Linguistics. Her research focuses on applications of corpus and text analysis.
Juniper Johnson
Juniper Johnson, Speaker and Organizing Committee Member
Juniper Johnson is an English PhD Student at Northeastern University studying classifications of gender, authority, and disability in nineteenth century domestic medical texts in the United States. Their research explores the history of a/sexuality in women’s professional and popular medical and scientific texts using genealogy, computational text analysis, and critical bibliography. While at Northeastern, Juniper has served as a research assistant for digital projects including: the Early Caribbean Digital Archive (ECDA), the Homosaurus (a LGBTQ+ linked vocabulary), the Women Writers Project, the Early Black Boston Digital Almanac (EBBDA), Mapping Black London (MBL), and the Primary Source Cooperative (with the Massachusetts's Historical Society). They have served as the Coordinator for the NULab for Maps, Texts, and Networks, and have also developed and led workshops with faculty partners on digital proficiencies for the Digital Integration Teaching Initiative.
Abbie Katz
Abbie Katz, Conference Host
Abbie Katz is the Administrative Assistant for the Programs in Digital Humanities at MIT, where she manages day-to-day administrative operations of the Programs. Outside of her role in Digital Humanities, Abbie is an educator and researcher with a background in the social sciences. Most recently, Abbie completed her PhD in African and African American Studies at Harvard University, where she conducted research on migrant networks in South Africa. Abbie also holds a master’s degree in African Studies from the University of Oxford, and a bachelor’s in Geography from the University of Manchester.
Anna Kijas
Anna Kijas, Speaker
Anna E. Kijas is the Head of Lilly Music Library at Tufts University and the co-founder of Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online, an initiative focused on safeguarding and preserving the digital cultural heritage of Ukraine during the Russo-Ukrainian War. Her interests include the exploration and application of digital humanities tools and methods in historical (music) research, and in the application of standards, including TEI and MEI, for open access research and publishing, and the use of minimal computing. Anna also works on nineteenth century music topics with a focus on gender, women, and performance criticism and reception.
Claire Lavarreda
Claire Lavarreda , Speaker
Claire Lavarreda is a World History Ph.D. student at Northeastern University, focusing on Indigenous history, archives, memory, and material culture. She graduated Summa Cum Laude from Eastern Connecticut State University in 2021, where she majored in History and Social Sciences and minored in Spanish. As a scholar with mixed heritage, she strives to approach her work with intersectionality, mixing Public History and Digital Humanities into her research.
Bee Lehman
Bee Lehman, Speaker and Organizing Committee Member
Bee is a migration historian focused on Europe. Currently, they work at Boston College as a Digital Humanities Program Librarian and Affiliated Faculty in History. They also so-lead a graduate program in digital humanities and teach courses for the same. With that focus, Bee is particularly interested in making history more accessible through mapping and visualizations, but also through making primary sources more accessible.
Allison Levy
Allison Levy, Speaker
Allison Levy (she, her) is Director of Brown University Digital Publications. Serving in this role since 2017, Allison brings together key organizational, academic, and technological resources to support new forms of faculty-authored scholarship, resulting in pathbreaking, award-winning publications. She also spearheads efforts at the industry level to advance the conversation around the development, evaluation, and publication of born-digital scholarship in the humanities. Allison, who holds a Ph.D. in history of art from Bryn Mawr College, is the author of numerous books on early modern visual culture. She has served as founding general editor of two scholarly book series and as co-chair of the College Art Association’s Committee on Research and Scholarship.
Zhuqing Li
Zhuqing Li, Speaker
Zhuqing Li is the head of Brown University Rockefeller Library’s exploration and research for East Asia and visiting associate professor of East Asian Studies. She has authored three books on Chinese linguistics and one on Chinese returnees. Her latest book is Daughters of the Flower Fragrant Garden: Two Sisters Separated by China's Civil War (Norton 2022). Zhuqing’s major digital project is “DEPICTING GLORY,” which she will be presenting at the symposium.
Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo
Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo, Speaker
SAMMUS (Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo) is a black feminist rap artist and beatmaker from Ithaca, NY with Ivorian and Congolese family roots. Since 2010 she has released six albums, and countless one-off collaborations. In 2019 she received her PhD in science and technology studies from Cornell University; her doctoral research explores the sociotechnical dynamics that shape the development of “community-studios”—recording studios that provide recording tools, sound engineering services and audio training to communities that often lack financial or social access to these resources. She is currently the David S. Josephson Assistant Professor of Music at Brown, teaching classes on rap songwriting and feminist sound studies. In 2020 she became the Community Outreach Chair for The Keeper Project, a digital humanities project at Brown that aims to comprehensively document the contributions of women and girls to Hip Hop since 1973. She is also a member of Brown’s Science, Technology, and Society steering committee. Her current research explorations include projects about the evolution of her revision praxis as a songwriter, the complicated discourse surrounding rap performance and AI, and the recent emergence of hip hop artists who draw heavily on video game aesthetics and stories to shape their work and cultivate their personas.
Savita Maharaj
Savita Maharaj, Speaker
Savita Maharaj is a first year English PhD student at Brandeis University. She received her Bachelors of Arts in English from Northeastern University in 2022. Her research interests are contemporary and eighteenth-century Caribbean history and literature, archival theory, critical histories of race and gender, and postcolonial theory. Savita currently serves as project manager and curriculum creator for the Early Black Boston Almanac. She also is a 2022 - 2024 Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory (HASTAC) Fellow, a RaceB4Race Social Media Fellows, and 2022-2023 Brandeis University Race and Literary Studies Graduate.
Arjun Maitra
Arjun Maitra, Speaker
Arjun Maitra is a high school junior who attends St. John's School in Houston, Texas. He is interested in cognitive science and exploring the intersection between computer science and the humanities. His research interests currently focus on applying natural language processing to various disciplines.
Giordana Mecagni
Giordana Mecagni, Speaker
Giordana Mecagni is Head of Special Collections and University Archivist at Northeastern University. In addition to Northeastern history, the archives houses and carefully curates a diverse and growing collection of historical records relating to Boston’s fight for social justice, focusing on social movements for civil and political rights, racial equity, immigrant rights, homelessness, and urban and environmental justice. Giordana works on projects that remove barriers between people and primary sources. She currently holds leadership roles in the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice project’s Burnham-Nobles Archive, a digital resource dedicated to identifying, classifying, and providing factual information and documentation about anti-Black killings in the mid-century South, the Boston Research Center, a digital community history and archives lab whose goal is to bring Boston’s deep neighborhood and community histories to light through the creation and use of new technologies, and Hacking the Archive, a MIT/DUSP research project focused on building a community of neighbors, community organizations, and local leaders to use our shared histories of organizing for racial and social equity in determining our strategies for the future. She recently co-wrote and published the white paper “Principles of Anti-Oppressive Community Engagement for Educators and Researchers,” and “Tear Down This (Pay)Wall!: Equality, Equity, Liberation for Archivists” in the Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies. Prior to her position at Northeastern, Giordana held various positions at Associated Grant Makers in Boston, the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe/Harvard, and at Harvard Medical School’s Center for the History of Medicine. She holds a BA in Sociology and Women’s Studies from the University of New Hampshire, and an MLIS with an archives concentration from Simmons.
Yana Mommadova
Yana Mommadova, Speaker
Yana Mommadova is a Sociology doctoral student at Northeastern University. She is originally from Central Asia and completed her undergraduate degrees in Economics and Political Science at the American University in Bulgaria. Her research is focused on exploring the degree to which financial anxiety and economic insecurity fuel cultural resentment and out-group hostility. In particular, she is interested in whether job insecurity exacerbates competition and resentment among voters. Together with her colleagues, she has recently published in Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economies and Societies and Work and Occupations.
Alayne Moody
Alayne Moody, Speaker
Alayne Moody is a Montreal-based PhD student in the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at Flinders University in Adelaide, South Australia. She uses the tools of natural language processing, Bayesian data analysis and multilevel modeling, combined with interpretative and critical reading methods, to look for broad patterns of human experience in historical life writing. Her 2021 master’s thesis at McGill University modelled sentiment and topics in letters written by 19th century immigrants in Canada and the United States. Her doctoral research examines subjective well-being in letters, diaries and autobiographies written in Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland between 1750 and 1913. Alayne has worked as project manager for the .txtlab cultural analytics group at McGill University and as research assistant for the Quebec Network Environment for Indigenous Health Research. Outside of academia, Alayne coordinates the Montreal chapter of the For Our Kids climate justice organization and co-leads the Jardins Wáhta green alley project. Originally from southern New England, Alayne has served in a variety of roles at Harvard University, the University of Massachusetts, and Boston University.
Patrick Murray-John
Patrick Murray-John, Speaker
Patrick Murray-John earned his Ph.D. in Early Medieval English Literature from the University of Wisconsin - Madison in 2003, and taught at the University of Richmond and the University of Mary Washington before moving into Instructional Technology at UMW. There, he worked with Drupal, WordPress, Omeka, and created bespoke applications to support research and teaching with emerging technologies. He joined the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media as a developer for Omeka in 2011, and moved to Northeastern University in 2018 as Associate Director for Systems in the Digital Scholarship Group. He is now Senior Digital Scholarship Developer in Snell Library at Northeastern. There, his primary work revolves around developing a WordPress plugin designed to present items and metadata from external sources via APIs, especially Northeastern's Digital Repository Service. Future plans for it include having it retrieve data from WikiData, WikiBase, and more. He has won awards and honors from the Modern Language Association, the University of California Santa Barbara, the Mozilla Foundation, and others. Throughout, he has been guided by his interests in using technology to create new and innovative representations of knowledge for teaching, learning, and research.
Rebecca Nedostup
Rebecca Nedostup, Organizing Committee Member
Rebecca Nedostup is a historian of twentieth-century China and Taiwan. She works on displacement and emplacement; the social and political roles of the living and the dead in times of disruption; and transitional justice and heritage projects. She is interested in critical archive studies, digital ontologies, and methods of sharing and “knowing” predigital, nondigital, and less accessible sources using digital tools. As faculty director of the Choices program, she collaborates with staff who produce accessible and research-informed history and current events curricula for secondary schools.
Garrett Dash Nelson
Garrett Dash Nelson, Organizing Committee Member
Garrett Dash Nelson is a historical geographer who currently serves as the President & Head Curator at the Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library. His research interests focus on the transformation of cities and landscapes in nineteenth and twentieth century New England, as well as on critical digital geography projects. He is also a Faculty Affiliate at Northeastern University. https://www.leventhalmap.org/about/people/garrett-nelson/
Maria Rita Nogueira
Maria Rita Nogueira, Speaker
Maria Rita Nogueira was born in Coimbra (Portugal) and she is a doctoral researcher in media arts and a performer, focused on interaction art, through human-computer interaction. In her research, she integrates body movement interaction and visual composition to reflect new perspectives of human presence. Maria Rita is always interested in audience involvement and studies human behavior in installation art that makes people interact through their bodies. Maria Rita did her BA and MA in Design & Multimedia and Ph.D. in Contemporary Art (Media Art focus) at the University of Coimbra. She is also a researcher at the Institute for Systems and Robotics, University of Coimbra. Besides her academic journey, Maria Rita is a contemporary dancer and choreographer, she participated in international dance festivals, as a performer and choreographer, where she received different recognitions and fellowships to Girne American University; Contemporary Dance Company Instável; Institute of Arts in Barcelona, among others. As a media artist and performer, she has developed different artistic creations, such as “Move In Tempo” (2021) a performance installation exhibited at the Czong Institute for Contemporary Art (CICA Museum) in South Korea, Machado de Castro Museum (UNESCO World Heritage) Portugal, CRIATECH - Art and Technology International Festival (best artwork of the Criatech Artistic Residences); “F O R M S” (2022) an interactive performance through artificial intelligence techniques, “Perspectives” (2022) a contemporary dance performance created for pre-professional dancers, “Painting with Movement” is an augmented reality application that draws the physical space through body movement, among other works. The main focus encompasses movement, interaction design, and creative coding to democratize art and involve the audience in an integral part of each artistic experience.
Kelly O'Neill
Kelly O'Neill, Speaker
Kelly O'Neill is a historian of the Russian Empire and an advocate of spatial history. Her first book, Claiming Crimea: A History of Catherine the Great’s Southern Empire, was published by Yale University Press in 2017. In 2018 she established The Imperiia Project, which integrates history, geographic information science, and historical cartography. She teaches, conducts training workshops, and regularly presents her research to audiences ranging from high school students to colleagues at academic institutions around the world. Kelly holds both a Ph.D. in History and an A.M. in Regional Studies—Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia (REECA) from Harvard University.
Charles Pflieger
Charles Pflieger, Speaker
Charles Pflieger graduated from Baylor University in Waco, Texas with a degree in Political Science. His research focused on the People’s Republic of China and in 2017 he studied in Beijing, China at Tsinghua University. From 2018 to 2021, Charles served as Congressional Staffer in the United States House of Representatives. During his time in the House, Charles worked on foreign affairs issues relating to the Peoples' Republic of China and the Russian Federation, including bills such as the Hong Kong People's Freedom and Choice Act of 2020. Following the events of January 6, 2021, Charles began his studies in International Relations. He is interested in researching the effects of corruption on the power dynamics of Post-Soviet states.
Patrick Rashleigh
Patrick Rashleigh, Speaker
Patrick Rashleigh is the Head of Digital Scholarship Technology Services at the Brown University Library, where he leads (and contributes to) a technical team that collaborates with faculty to create digital scholarly products. He is also an instructor and teaches a variety of classes on visual communication to students, faculty, and staff.
Brianna Reisbeck
Brianna Reisbeck, Speaker
Ian Roy
Ian Roy, Speaker and Organizing Committee Member
Ian Roy is the Director for Research Technology and Innovation in Brandeis University's Library. He is also the Founding Head of the Brandeis MakerLab and an Adjunct Professor at the Brandeis International Business School - a Lecturer in the Anthropology Department, and a Lecturer in the Engineering Department. His group Research Technology and Innovation manages the 3 public Makerspaces in the Brandeis Library: The MakerLab, The Automation Lab, and the Digital Scholarship Lab.
Amanda Rust
Amanda Rust, Speaker
Amanda had worked in academic libraries for more than 20 years, focusing on the intersection of people, learning, and technology. She is currently the Associate Director for Research & Learning at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, and has worked on projects in areas such as community archives, inclusive information systems, and Wikipedia and information literacy.
Diana Duarte Salinas
Diana Duarte Salinas, Speaker
Diana Duarte works at the intersection between the construction of a Latin American women’s intellectual identity in the XIX Century, archival research, literary analysis, and feminist theory, with a focus on how nineteenth-century Latin American female intellectuals and writers, especially Soledad Acosta de Samper, developed narrative strategies to position themselves in the cultural and intellectual field of their time. Duarte earned her B.A. in Literary Studies (2014-2019) and a MA in Literary Studies (2019-2021) from the National University of Colombia, where she taught classes on nineteenth-century Latin American literature. Duarte participates in research groups at Universidad Nacional de Colombia and Universidad de los Andes where she develops projects focused on digital humanities, literature, and history. Currently, she works at the Emory Center of Digital Scholarship as a research assistant for the Apollo 15 project. Duarte is also interested in literary translation, Latin American literature and history, literary theory, language learning, and digital humanities.
Erika Schneider
Erika Schneider, Speaker
Alyssa Smith
Alyssa Smith, Speaker
Alyssa Smith (she/her) is a second-year PhD student at Northeastern’s Network Science Institute. She’s a data engineer and data scientist by training and works on building more robust data pipelines for Twitter datasets. She is the project manager for POTATO and works on the data engineering and infrastructure for the site as well.
David Smith
David Smith, Speaker
David Smith is an associate professor in Northeastern University's Khoury College of Computer Science and a founding member of the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Network's, Northeastern's faculty research center for the digital humanities and computational social sciences. His research focuses on applications of natural language processing to the humanities and social sciences, such as the Vital Texts, Oceanic Exchanges, and Arabic-script OCR Catalyst projects.
Mark Szarko
Mark Szarko, Organizing Committee Member
Mark is a librarian at MIT, where he works with the departments of Comparative Media Studies, Literature, Philosophy, and Theater Arts. He also consults on digital humanities projects.
Laura Tamayo
Laura Tamayo, Speaker
Cassie Tanks
Cassie Tanks, Speaker
Cassie Tanks is an archivist, aspiring historian, and first generation student originally from San Diego, California. She is pursuing a PhD in World History at Northeastern University, has an MSLS from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a bachelor’s in History from San Diego State University.
Giulia Taurino
Giulia Taurino, Speaker
Giulia Taurino, Ph.D. is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at The Institute for Experiential AI (Khoury College of Computer Sciences, Northeastern University). Her research focuses on forms of content organization on online platforms and digital archives, cultural implications of algorithmic technologies, and applications of artificial intelligence in the arts, cultural heritage and museum sectors. She is a member of the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks, where she works on AI toolkits for media and cultural studies (current projects: Boston Globe Photo-Morgue Project, Archival Narratives of Climate Change). Past affiliations include Brown University's Virtual Humanities Lab, metaLAB (at) Harvard, MIT Data + Feminism Lab. Giulia holds a doctoral degree in Media Studies and Visual Arts from the University of Bologna and the University of Montreal.
Milan Terlunen
Milan Terlunen, Chair
Milan Terlunen is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow within SHASS at MIT. He conceived and realized a pilot project to study the practice of quotation in scholarly writing while earning his PhD at Columbia University. He led a team at Columbia’s Group for Experimental Methods in Humanistic Research that built a text-matcher tool to detect quotations from a source text in a large collection of academic journal articles. At MIT, he is using the text-matcher tool and conceptual framework developed through this pilot project to ask a new set of questions about a different set of texts, with the end goal of offering a new account of how “theory” functions, and how it developed historically, within the writings of scholars across the humanities and social sciences.
Emily Coolidge Toker
Emily Coolidge Toker, Organizing Committee Member
Emily Coolidge Toker is the Digital Pedagogy Librarian at Harvard Library, supporting faculty and librarians with instructional design, educational technology integration, and pedagogical innovation. She provides training workshops, consultations, and personalized assistance to faculty, students, researchers, and library staff, as well as public workshops for the community. Emily has an MLIS from Simmons, an M.A. in Cultural Studies from Sabanci University, and a B.A. in Sociology from Bryn Mawr College. Her research interests include translation theory, mimesis, the globalization and politics of English, and diaspora studies. She supports the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, and the Judaica Division.
Michael Toler
Michael Toler, Speaker
Michael A. Toler is Michael A. Toler is Archnet Content Manager of Archnet.org in the Aga Khan Documentation Center, MIT Libraries (AKDC@MIT). Archnet is an Open Access digital library focused on the built environment of Muslim societies. From 2001-2010 he served as the Program Director for the Al Musharaka Initiative of the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education. Michael was responsible for the development of content for the Arab Culture and Civilization Online Resource and for coordinating inter-institutional, collaborative endeavors of faculty, librarians, and technologists using technology to enhance teaching and research on topics relating to Islam, the Middle East, and North Africa.
Vanessa Nicole Torres
Vanessa Nicole Torres, Speaker
Vanessa Nicole Torres is a second year student and 2021-2023 HASTAC Scholar at Northeastern University. She has a Bachelor of Arts in Chicana/o/x-Latina/o/x Studies with a double minor in Latin American Studies and Literary Journalism from the University of California, Irvine. As a first generation Latina scholar, she investigates intergenerational, digital, and emotive approaches to documenting Latiné/x, more specifically Queer Latiné/x, community and education spaces.
Inmaculada Ureña-Asensio
Inmaculada Ureña-Asensio, Speaker
Inmaculada Ureña Asensio is a PhD candidate at the University of Jaén, Spain, working on the fields of Thomas More Studies and Digital Humanities. She graduated from the Universidad de Jaén in 2018 and obtained a MA in English Studies in that same university. She has collaborated with the project “Thomas More and Spain (16th and 17th centuries): ideological and textual construction” and has been granted a fellowship by the Spanish Ministry of Universities to pursue her doctoral studies. In the latest years, she has participated in several international conferences and published some book reviews and articles in international journals. For her thesis dissertation, she is encoding with TEI the Spanish translation of Thomas More’s Utopia rendered by Gerónimo de Medinilla in 1637. After receiving training in text encoding, text analysis and web design in the specialized program “Programming for Digital Humanists”, offered by the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED) in Spain, she became interested in pursuing a complete study of this Spanish translation using digital methods. She is currently doing a research visit at Northeastern University under the supervision of Dr. Julia Flanders, director of the Digital Scholarship Group and the Women Writers Project.
Vivian Wei
Vivian Wei, Speaker
Vivian Yingzi Wei is a first-year graduate student in the Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) program. Vivian graduated from Georgia Institute of Technology in 2015 with a degree in Industrial engineering. After graduation, Vivian built her career path in the global investment banking industry and became a CFA and FRM charterholder. Her current research interests include cross-cultural studies, globalization, international affairs, management, entrepreneurship, trade and investment at the intersection of computational science.
Si Wu
Si Wu, Speaker
Si Wu is a 3rd-year Ph.D. student at Northeastern University Khoury College of Computer Sciences. Her research interests include natural language processing, computational social science, and digital humanities. Her published work covers the topics of book layout analysis, psycholinguistics, and font reconstruction. Besides the Boston Globe Photo Archive project, she is currently working on computational methods for text summarization. While in college, Si participated in the Print and Probability project, where an interdisciplinary team of scholars attempted to identify the printers of Areopagitica via broken types. Si received her B.S. in Computer Engineering from the University of California, San Diego.
Elizabeth Yalkut
Elizabeth Yalkut, Speaker
Elizabeth Yalkut is the front-end developer at the Center for Digital Scholarship, Brown University Library. She focuses on accessibility and universal design, component-based design approaches, and collaborative coding. Previously, she was the senior front-end developer at Harvard Medical School, and also worked as a developer at Columbia University and the digital agency Threespot. She has a B.A. in history from Barnard College, Columbia University.
Zoe Zimmerman
Zoe Zimmerman, Speaker
Zoe Zimmermann is the research coordinator for Stolen Relations. Stolen Relations was Zoe's first foray into digital humanities when she joined the project as a research assistant in 2020. Since then, she has participated in numerous other digital scholarship projects, including the Northeast Slavery Records Index, development of digital platforms for the John Carter Brown Library, and a digital guerrilla archival collective at Brown University, among others. As a historian, Zoe is interested in early American history, Indigenous history, and the history of science. Her thesis explored how Indigenous guides and informants both influenced and inhibited 17th-century New England cartography. Zoe is originally from Florida and graduated from Brown University with honors in History and Early Modern Studies last fall.