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, “African American Social Networks and Claims-Making in Postbellum Tennessee,” features Stanley Maxson, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. He specializes in nineteenth-century African American history and is especially interested in studying the transition from slavery to freedom, space and place in the post-civil war South, and the role of domestic relationships in constructing citizenship. His dissertation, “The Ties that Bind: African American Social Networks and Claims-Making in Postbellum Tennessee,” explores the multiple meanings of postwar Black mobility in the late nineteenth century. He is eager to work with AADHum to use digital humanities tools to bring together rich, but scattered, geographic information found in the Civil War pension files of Black veterans and their families in order to examine how pension applications brought people together across space and time in tangible ways.

Before beginning his Ph.D work at the University of Maryland, Stan received an M.A. in History from the University of Missouri, Columbia. Currently, Stan teaches a historical research methods seminar in the Department of History and eagerly encourages students to consider how the digital humanities can benefit public facing academic research. Stan maintains a strong commitment to public history by working toward a graduate certificate in Museum Scholarship and Material from the Department of American Studies and through his work as a 2018-2019 Graduate Teaching Fellow at the Teaching and Learning Transformation Center.