The DH Salon series is a regular, informal presentation series bringing together digital humanities work across the Brown University campus. 

Fall 2023 Schedule

Select Tuesdays at noon on Zoom or in the Digital Scholarship Lab (room 137) at the Rockefeller Library. Lunch and refreshments are provided.

September 12 – Register here

“Ro(u)ted By Our Stories: Creating a Community-Based Indo-Caribbean Oral History Archive”

Ro(u)ted By Our Stories is a collaborative, digital oral history archive of the Indo-Caribbean diaspora created and hosted on platforms such as TheirStory and Mukurtu. In this session, participants will explore the methods, ethics, and frameworks of feminist collective healing that guide this project, placing them in conversation with digital humanities projects based in academic institutions.

Tarika Sankar is Digital Humanities Librarian at the Center for Digital Scholarship and critical scholar of Indo-Caribbean diaspora, Caribbean literature, race and ethnic studies, and digital humanities. She works in project development, leading a selection of our projects; creates digital humanities instructional materials; teaches digital humanities methods to scholars of all levels across the campus; and works to develop new, sustainable research projects, instructional materials, and curricular offerings in digital methods in the humanities. 

September 26 – Register here

“Grounds for Reclamation: Fascism and Post-Fascism in the Marshes”

The concept of reclamation to fascist politics, ideology and culture. Professor Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg will argue that it was fundamental to consensus building (Part 1) and that it today — as the reclamation of reclamation — has played an essential role in right-wing populist discourses (Part 2).

Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg is the John P. Birkelund Distinguished Professor of European Studies, Professor and Chair of Italian Studies, Professor of Comparative Literature, and Affiliated Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown. She works on the literature, culture and politics of nineteenth and twentieth century Italy and Germany. She received her B.A. (Hons.) from the University of Essex, Great Britain, her Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale University, and M.A. in German Studies from Cornell University. 

Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg is the John P. Birkelund Distinguished Professor of European Studies, Professor and Chair of Italian Studies, Professor of Comparative Literature, and Affiliated Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown. She works on the literature, culture and politics of nineteenth and twentieth century Italy and Germany. She received her B.A. (Hons.) from the University of Essex, Great Britain, her Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale University, and M.A. in German Studies from Cornell University. 

October 17 – Register here

“DH salon: Behind the Scenes: Engaging the Americas at the HMA Mellon Grant Project ”

From 2018-2023, Brown’s Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology spearheaded a massive project to re-house, re-catalog, and photograph the North American archaeological collections in our care, using funds awarded by the Mellon Foundation. Using Scalar, Curatorial Assistant Dr. Jessica Nelson developed a digital exhibition focusing on the process developed during the project to care for the 19,000 objects addressed during the grant timeline. This digital exhibition offers members of the public a glimpse into the process of caring for these objects and behind the scenes into our storage spaces, allowing us to share collection care processes, museum spaces, and volumes of material that cannot be shared in our traditional exhibitions.

Jessica Nelson is Curatorial Assistant at the Haffenreffer Museum and a historical archaeologist with research interests in New Netherland, Dutch Atlantic colonies, the 17th century, archaeological approaches to identity, and historic ceramics. She loves learning about people, past and present, through the objects that they produce, use, and discard.

October 31 – Register here

“Decolonization in Oceania: Decolonization Activism in Guåhan and Hawai’i”

“Decolonization in Oceania: Decolonization Activism in Guåhan and Hawai’i” is a public digital humanities project consists of a series of educational materials which connect ongoing Indigenous-led decolonization movements in Guåhan and Hawai’i through an examination of topics such as demilitarization, environmental justice, gender and sexuality, and health and healing. The project emerged out of a year-long consultation process with an advisory board composed of activists from both locales.

Kevin Escudero is an Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnic Studies and affiliated faculty member in the Department of Sociology, Population Studies and Training Center, and Native American and Indigenous Studies at Brown University. Professor Escudero’s research and teaching interests include comparative studies of race, ethnicity, and Indigeneity; U.S. empire and settler colonialism; immigration and citizenship; social movements; and law. His book, Organizing While Undocumented (New York University Press, 2020) examines undocumented Asian, Latinx, queer, and formerly undocumented activists’ strategic use of an intersectional movement identity. 

November 14 – Register here

“How to turn a traditional graduate student paper into a Digital Humanities project”

Digital Humanities projects don’t have to be massive, multi-year projects with an interdisciplinary team of scholars and an enormous budget. Like all scholarship, digital scholarship comes in all shapes, sizes, scopes, and timelines. In this talk, History PhD student Haley Price will discuss her experiences making small, semester-long digital humanities projects and how she has been able to incorporate digital methodology into final history essays for her coursework.

Haley Price is a History Ph.D. student at Brown University and the Digital Humanities Specialist for UT Austin’s JapanLab. She studied History and Humanities as an undergraduate at UT Austin, where she engineered her own interdisciplinary degree plan to create educational history-based video games.

November 28 – canceled

“The Mass Incarceration Lab”