Brown University Library News

Join the Brown University Library’s Center for Digital Scholarship as we host a three-part lecture series on new directions in digital scholarship.

Free and open to the public.

Archipelagos of Marronage: Black Femme Freedom
– Jessica Marie Johnson

Tuesday, February 4, 2024 at 4 p.m.
Churchill House Living Room, 155 Angell Street

This talk is sponsored by the Center for Digital Scholarship and the Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice.

Jessica Marie Johnson

Jessica Marie Johnson is Associate Professor in the Department of History at the Johns Hopkins University and Director of LifexCode: Digital Humanities Against Enclosure. Johnson is a historian of Atlantic slavery and the Atlantic African diaspora. She is the author of “Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World” (University of Pennsylvania Press, August 2020). The book is a winner of the 2021 Lora Romero First Book Publication Prize of the American Studies Association, the 2021 Wesley-Logan Prize form the American Historical Association, the 2021 Rosalyn Terborg-Penn Prize for Outstanding Original Scholarship on Gender and Sexuality in the African Diaspora from the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora, the 2021 Frank L. and Harriet C. Owsley Award for Best Book in Southern History from the Southern Historical Association, the 2020 Kemper and Leila Williams Prize for Louisiana History, the 2020 Berkshire Conference of Women Historians First Book Prize, the 2020 Rebel Women Lit Caribbean Readers’ Award for Best Non-Fiction Book, an Honorable Mention for the 2021 Pauli Murray Book Award from the African American Intellectual History Society, and a finalist for the Frederick Douglass Book Prize from the Gilder-Lehrman Institute.

Johnson is an internationally recognized digital humanist. Johnson is the Director of LifexCode: Digital Humanities Against Enclosure and Senior Research Associate with the Center for the Digital Humanities at Johns Hopkins University. Johnson is PI of Black Beyond Data, a Black studies computational and social sciences lab, with co-PIs Kim Gallon and Alexandre White. Alongside Dr. Yomaira C. Figueroa, Johnson also co-directs the Diaspora Solidarities Lab, a Mellon-funded multi-university initiative applying Black feminist methodologies to collaborative scholarship. Johnson’s essay, “Markup Bodies: Black [Life] Studies and Slavery [Death] Studies at the Digital Crossroads” is widely recognized as a ground-breaking intervention in the fields of Black studies, digital humanities and data science. Johnson is co-editor with Lauren Tilton and David Mimno of Debates in the Digital Humanities: Computational Humanities. She was guest editor of Slavery in the Machine, a special issue of archipelagos journal (2019) and co-editor with Dr. Mark Anthony Neal (Duke University) of Black Code: A Special Issue of the Black Scholar (2017).

Her work has appeared in Slavery & Abolition,The Black Scholar, Meridians: Feminism, Race and Transnationalism, American Quarterly, Social Text, The Journal of African American History, the William & Mary Quarterly, Debates in the Digital Humanities, Forum Journal, Bitch Magazine, Black Perspectives (AAIHS), Somatosphere and Post-Colonial Digital Humanities (DHPoco) and her book chapters have appeared in multiple edited collections. Most recently, Johnson signed a two book deal with the Liveright, an imprint of W. W. Norton, to publish a non-fiction monograph examining Black women’s engagement with history of slavery and how that engagement appears and reappears in digital and social media; and a history of Black researchers and the first generation of Black people freed from slavery in the United States. Johnson is represented by McKinnon Literary.

The Revolution Will Not Be Datafied: Dispatches from the Digital Black Atlantic
– Roopika Risam

Friday, April 5, 2024 at 4 p.m.
Patrick Ma Digital Scholarship Lab, Rockefeller Library
& via Zoom

Registration requested

Roopika Risam

Roopika Risam is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies and of Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College, where she is part of the Digital Humanities and Social Engagement Cluster.

Formerly, Risam was Chair of Secondary and Higher Education and Associate Professor of Education and English at Salem State University. There, she also served as the Faculty Fellow for Digital Library Initiatives, Co-Director of the Viking OER and Textbook Affordability Initiative, Coordinator of the Graduate Certificate in Digital Studies, and Coordinator of the Combined B.A./M.Ed. in English Education.

Her research interests lie at the intersections of postcolonial and African diaspora studies, humanities knowledge infrastructures, and digital humanities.

Risam’s work has been supported by over $4.3 million in grants from funders including the Mellon Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, Institute for Museum and Library Services, Mass Humanities, and the Massachusetts Department of Higher Education.

Her first monograph, New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy, was published by Northwestern University Press in 2018. She is the co-editor of Intersectionality in Digital Humanities (Arc Humanities/Amsterdam University Press, 2019) and South Asian Digital Humanities: Postcolonial Mediations Across Technology’s Cultural Canon (Routledge, 2020). Risam’s latest co-edited collection The Digital Black Atlantic in the Debates in the Digital Humanities series (University of Minnesota Press) was published in 2021. Her current book project, “Insurgent Academics: A Radical Account of Public Humanities,” which traces a new history of public humanities through the emergence of ethnic studies, is under contract with Johns Hopkins University Press.

Her scholarship has appeared in Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Digital Humanities Quarterly, Debates in the Digital Humanities, First Monday, Popular Communications, College and Undergraduate Libraries, and Native American and Indigenous Studies, among other journals and volumes.

Risam is Principal Investigator of the Digital Ethnic Futures Consortium (DEFCon), which brings together faculty who work at the intersections of ethnic studies and digital humanities. She is currently developing The Global Du Bois, a data visualization project on W.E.B. Du Bois. She also co-directs Reanimate, an intersectional feminist publishing collective that recovers archival writing by women in media industries, and co-hosts Rocking the Academy, a podcast featuring conversations with the very best truth tellers, who are formulating a new vision of higher education. She is also a founding member of The Data-Sitters Club and co-editor of Reviews in Digital Humanities.

Performative Pasts and Speculative Histories: Playing in and with the Digital West in Red Dead Redemption
– Ashlee Hope Bird

Thursday, April 25, 2024 at 4 p.m.
Patrick Ma Digital Scholarship Lab, Rockefeller Library
& via Zoom

Registration requested

Ashlee Hope Bird

Ashlee Hope Bird (Western Abenaki), a Native American game designer and PhD in Native American Studies, is Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame. She originally hails from the Champlain Valley of Vermont. Her dissertation, “Representation and Reclamation: The History and Future of Natives in Gaming,” theorizes digital sovereignty, drawing on Native American studies, media studies, and game studies to address representations of Native American characters in video games. The work analyzes specific colonial methodologies being replicated within game spaces in order to then replace these with decolonial methods of game design being undertaken by herself and fellow Native game designers with a focus on what she terms “synthetic Indigenous identity,” oriented around promoting Indigenous futures. Bird is currently working on a book manuscript tentatively titled Red Dead Redemption: Finding My Place in the Digital West that explores the complex relationships that different players have with games and undertakes an exploration of the Red Dead Redemption series and what the games have offered (or not offered) to their player bases.

Beyond her academic writing, she has created three artworks, publicly exhibited seven times in group and solo exhibitions, and has curated one show. Among these are two of her original video games, One Small Step and Full of Birds, which have been featured in the InDigital Space at the ImagineNATIVE Film & Media Festival in 2018 and 2019 respectively. She is also a founding member of the UC Davis ModLab, an experimental laboratory for media research and digital humanities. Bird was accepted to and passed the pilot program in Abenaki Language (her heritage language) at the Middlebury College Language School in July of 2020, and then went on to Complete Ndakinna IG A200: Intermediate Guide to Abenaki through the Ndakinna School. She is also working with the Wôbanakik Heritage Center to help develop a digital museum featuring elements of Abenaki history and culture.