Visiting Scholars

2019 Distinguished Scholar

Jessica Marie Johnson

Jessica Marie Johnson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the Johns Hopkins University.

Portrait of Professor Jessica Marie Johnson

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, Debates in the Digital Humanities, Forum Journal, Bitch Magazine, Black Perspectives (AAIHS), Somatosphere, and Post-Colonial Digital Humanities (DHPoco).

Johnson is a historian of Atlantic slavery and the Atlantic African diaspora. She is the author of Practicing Freedom: Black Women, Intimacy, and Kinship in New Orleans Atlantic World (University of Pennsylvania Press, under contract). She is co-editor with Dr. Mark Anthony Neal (Duke University) of Black Code: A Special Issue of the Black Scholar (2017), a collection of work exploring the field of Black Code Studies and editor of Slavery in the Machine: sx:archipelagos  (forthcoming). She is founding curatrix at African Diaspora, Ph.D. or #ADPhD (africandiasporaphd.com), co-organizer of the Queering Slavery Working Group with Dr. Vanessa Holden (University of Kentucky), a member of the LatiNegrxs Project (lati-negros.tumblr.com), and a Digital Alchemist at the Center for Solutions to Online Violence (http://femtechnet.org/csov/).

Related Events

April 9th

Black Code Studies: A Digital Toolkit Luncheon

A skillshare and discussion of how #BlackCodeStudies informs and operates in digital humanities and the humanities more broadly. Bring your favorite tools, projects and skills you are willing to share to keep the conversation going!

Constellation Noire: Scrying Diasporic Futures in Plain Text

Public lecture followed by a reception

Black digital practice holds space for Black life to be seen without the rancor of the voyeur, appreciated without the demand for consumption.  What makes this rich and deep intellectual work so powerful is the way it challenges the container of West and Western thought. This talk discusses black digital practice and the ways black theory, black thought, and black study can remake our engagement with the digital, offering terrestrial and extraterrestial reformulations of being.

April 10th

Black x Digital: A Graduate Workshop in Digital Praxis

Learn more about the ways black studies intersects with digital practice and the digital humanities. Johnson will showcase select projects (including her own) that do this work in various ways and lead a series of exercise on how to think about Black Studies in conversation with doing digital work.

This program is co-sponsored by the Department of History, the Department of Art and Art History, the Department of English, the Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies, the Frederick Douglass Institute for African and African-American Studies, the Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, the Center for Learning in the Digital Age (LiDA), the Digital Scholarship Lab, and the University Committee for Interdisciplinary Studies.

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Past Visiting Scholars

Victoria Szabo

/ March 2-3, 2017

Dr. Victoria Szabo is Associate Research Professor of Visual and Media Studies; Director of the Digital Humanities Initiative; and the Director of Graduate Studies for the PhD program in Computational Media, Arts, and Cultures at Duke University.

Related Events:

  • Omeka Workshop in the Vista Collaboratory
  • Lunch with graduate students: Careers in the Digital Humanities
  • Keynote: “Cultural Approaches to Digital Heritage”
  • Digital Humanities Round Table: “Tuning In: Sound in the Digital Humanities.” Victoria Szabo in conversation with University of Rochester’s Darren Mueller (Assistant Professor of Musicology), Oliver Schneller (Professor of Composition), Ming-Lun Lee (Assistant Professor of Audio and Music Engineering), and Paul Fess (Predoctoral Fellow at the Frederick Douglass Institute)
  • DH Lunch: “Zooming Out”
  • Game Demo and Concluding Conversation: “Psychasthenia“
Recap: Omeka Workshop
Recap: “Cultural Approaches to Digital Heritage” Keynote Lecture
Recap: Psychasthenia 2
Recap: The DH Graduate Student and the Job Market

Laura Mandell

/ February 19-20, 2015

Dr. Laura Mandell is the Director of the Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture at Texas A&M University.

mandell2
Related Events:

  • Presentation: “Big Data and the Humanities”
  • Lunch with graduate students
  • Keynote: “Scaling Up: Search as Research”
  • Panel: “Archives in Between: Cultural Preservation, Material to Digital” (Welles-Brown Room), with Joanne Bernardi (Associate Professor of Japanese and Film and Media Studies, and author/editor of ReEnvisioning Japan), Daniela Currò (Preservation Manager, Moving Image Department, George Eastman House), and Jim Kuhn (Joseph N. Lambert and Harold B. Schleifer Director of Rare Books and Special Collections)
  • DH Lunch: “The Dark Side of Digital Humanities”
Visiting Scholar Twitter Recap
Schedule: Laura Mandell, Visiting Scholar in Digital Humanities

Ed Ayers

/ March 17-19, 2015

Dr. Edward Ayers is President of the University of Richmond.

In “The Shape of the Civil War,” the Heritage of DH

By Eitan Freedenberg
Confronting the popular claim that DH is simply a new coat of (bureaucratic and distracting) paint on traditional humanistic methods, Ayers discussed at length the “History of the Civil War in the United States,” a most unusual visual timeline from late nineteenth century historian Arthur Hodgkin Scaife’s “Comparative and Synoptical System of History Applied to All Countries.” more »