AADHum Scholars – African American History, Culture & Digital Humanities

Taking Care: The Question of AR, VR, and Blackness

Jessica Lu — Mon, 08 Jul 2019 16:00:11 +0000

I can’t breathe. At once: the wheezing out of a severely singular experience. Yet and also: a hailing of the social, political, economic, and environmental phenomena surrounding Eric Garner’s loss of breath. My dissertation, On Black Breath: A Theory and Praxis, undertakes a partial genealogy of breath as it has been racialized within the

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From Analyzing to Actualizing Apartheid: A Journey in Realization

Jessica Lu — Mon, 24 Jun 2019 16:00:09 +0000

As an educator, scholar, journalist and filmmaker, my work has sat at the intersection of black digital humanities and creative scholarship for the last decade. A TV nerd, I spent the first half of my career examining the representation of black women in television. I was consumed by depictions of black women on the

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Standing Together Across Time and Space: Black Social Networks in Late Nineteenth Century Tennessee

Jessica Lu — Mon, 10 Jun 2019 16:00:28 +0000

On October 25, 1865, Henrietta Joyce and Elisha Helms stood before a clerk of the court of Davidson County, Tennessee, to confirm Henrietta’s marriage to her late husband, John Joyce. They appeared before the court in Henrietta’s effort to secure a Civil War widow’s pension based on her husband’s military service in the United

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“Is this thing on?”

Jessica Lu — Mon, 27 May 2019 16:00:32 +0000

Like many graduate students, I have a very difficult time explaining my project. In my mind it feels enormous and abstract; on paper it feels niche and surely uninteresting to anyone else. Presentations often leave me floating somewhere in the middle, my eyes searching over the audience for any hint of recognition: “This means

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Sharing “The Lost Boys”: Making a Marriage Between a Book and a Website

Jessica Lu — Tue, 12 Jun 2018 13:30:27 +0000

I recently built a new professional website on squarespace. The website is a place for me to share details about upcoming talks that I’m giving, and a place for visitors to find information about my research and teaching than I cannot easily display on my standard history department faculty profile page. The squarespace site

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Toward A Deeper Understanding of Digital Humanities Research in Black Studies

Catherine Knight Steele — Thu, 10 May 2018 18:33:48 +0000

Fresh off the completion of a bachelor’s degree in African American Studies, I was introduced to the intersection of Black Studies and the digital humanities through AADHum. Hearing about the initiative at the start of my doctoral coursework triggered immense curiosity. Digital humanities has its own wow factor; there are shiny new applications and ultra-modern

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Reimagining the Lives of Black Soldiers Wives and Widows in Post-Civil War America

Catherine Knight Steele — Wed, 25 Apr 2018 14:47:07 +0000

My book project, Her Claim for Pension is Lawful and Just, chronicles struggles of black women seeking benefits from the United States government on the basis of their standing as the wives and widows of the men who served in the Union army during the Civil War. By employing the resources and digital tools learned

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A (Re)Energizing Pedagogical Approach: Engaging Digital Tools to Teach African American Literature

Catherine Knight Steele — Fri, 30 Mar 2018 13:01:23 +0000

As an AADHum Scholar, one of my goals is to strengthen the connection between my research and teaching of 20th and 21st Century African American Literature. Drawing on work by Orrie Flores, David Green, Adam Banks, Bryan Carter, and Phill Branch, I have always encouraged my students to participate in literature through the creation of

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Beyond Preservation: A Digital Intervention Into Theatre & Performance Studies

Catherine Knight Steele — Wed, 14 Mar 2018 15:29:26 +0000

When New York University established the first Performance Studies department in 1980 and, subsequently, incorporated the discipline into theatre departments, it caused a lot of anxiety about theatre’s permanence within the academy. Over time, Theatre and Performance Studies have found a way to happily co-exist with one another, demonstrating how controversial conversations within these two

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“Huddles” and Hurdles: A Feminist Scholar’s Introduction to Black DH”

Catherine Knight Steele — Wed, 14 Feb 2018 14:42:18 +0000

It seems that everyone has a different opinion about the “right way” to “do” feminism. The argument about “what constitutes feminism” is being taken up everywhere and by everyone—from the Merriam-Webster Dictionary to Emma Watson. Rather than untangling these arguments here, I propose that these conflicting opinions indicate that we all can and should be

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