MITH is excited to announce that Purdom Lindblad will be joining us in the newly established position of Assistant Director for Innovation and Learning, beginning in July. In this position, she will play a leadership role in managing MITH’s growing portfolio of courses and instructional programs.
Purdom comes to us from Scholars’ Lab at the University of Virginia, where as Head of Graduate Programs she collaborated with graduate student fellows, developers, librarians, and designers to create a space for experimentation and play. She was a crucial team member of the Praxis Program, which introduces graduate students to research questions and methods for the digital humanities, and she also worked with UVA’s Director of Diversity to develop a Leadership Alliance Mellon Institute (LAMI), a digital humanities-inflected summer research program, for which she developed two courses in Research Methods and an Introduction to Digital Humanities. Dedicated to cultivating supportive communities for learning, Purdom thrives in collaborative environments where people are at the heart of her work. As she notes,
“I strive to foster spaces and programs where novices as well as experienced practitioners are encouraged to take creative and intellectual risks.”
Purdom’s research interests include feminist interface design, exploring how digital projects can be empathetic platforms for both the users and the people affected by the content. She and her Scholars’ Lab colleague Jeremy Boggs are in the process of incorporating these principles into the interface of Take Back the Archive, a digital public history project being created by UVA faculty, students, librarians, and archivists.