Intensives provide a space for a single researcher or small research team to engage directly with members of the AADHum community and MITH team in an open, flexible format meant to foster learning, discussion, and progress. AADHum Intensives further distill the most powerful elements of AADHum’s hallmark activities (workshops, reading groups and incubators) to facilitate the creation of excellent digital humanities work: presentation, as each researcher delivers a brief talk contextualizing the development of their digital project; dialogue, as participants engage with the researcher, with the goal of providing purposeful feedback and fostering discussion of two key theoretical or disciplinary readings that ground their project; and skill building, as AADHum and MITH staff support each researcher to develop or refine a key technical skill relevant to their project.

During the Spring 2019 semester, Intensives will feature members of the 2019 AADHum Scholars cohort and focus on supporting them in the advancement of their digital projects in African American history and culture. Though these Intensives do not provide broad theoretical or digital skills training, they are open to the public. We enthusiastically welcome all interested parties who want to learn more about the Scholars’ projects and/or participate in the ongoing development of their work. Please come prepared to engage in a discussion-driven, seminar-style event.

This Intensives session, “On the Weight of Breath,” features Kimberly Bain, a Ph.D. Candidate in English and Interdisciplinary Humanistic Study at Princeton University. Kimberly’s most pressing intellectual interests have consolidated around questions of the history, theory, and philosophy of: diaspora, race, gender, postcolonialism, enslavement, flesh, environmental racism, resistance, embodiment, and subjection and subjecthood. Her dissertation, entitled “On Black Breath: A Theory and Praxis,” takes seriously the charge of “I can’t breathe” and considers breath as more than the mere metaphor—rather, as also a somatic and sociopolitical phenomenon that has resonances in the wake of enslavement to the contemporary moment. At Princeton, Kimberly is affiliated with the American Studies Program and African-American Studies Department. More information about her current work can be found at kimbain.com.