April 14 – 15, 2023 Spring Conference
Digital Humanities Against Dark Times
Please join us for the Center for Digital Humanities’ two-day Spring conference. Digital Humanities Against Dark Times provides a venue for discussing digital humanities work that engages with emerging and ongoing crises of our moment, including rising political extremism and polarization, racism, colonial exploitation, gender marginalization, data capitalism and new forms of artificial intelligence, military conflict and global political instability, catastrophic climate change, and the uncertain future of the humanities in the academy.
This program aims to generate dialogue between different critical and methodological perspectives, including those that focus on promoting and preserving communities of hope, resilience, and resistance.
Register to attend the conference here. All are welcome.
All events will take place at 1101 19th Ave. S.
Find the full program schedule here.
We are thrilled to announce our two keynote lectures:
3:30 pm Friday, April 14
Dr. Alex Gil, “Digital Humanities In The Post-Apocalypse: Minimal Computing and Other Defense Mechanisms”
Alex is Senior Lecturer II and Associate Research Faculty of Digital Humanities in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Yale University. Before joining Yale, Alex served for ten years as Digital Scholarship Librarian at Columbia University, where he co-created and nurtured the Butler Studio and the Group for Experimental Methods in Humanistic Research. He is currently senior editor of archipelagos journal, editor of internationalization of Digital Humanities Quarterly, co-organizer of The Caribbean Digital annual conference, and co-principal investigator of the Caribbean Digital Scholarship Collective, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon foundation.
Over the past decade, he has been a prolific producer and contributing team member of many recognized digital humanities projects and scholarly software, including Torn Apart/Separados, In The Same Boats and Wax. His scholarly articles have appeared in several essay collections and refereed journals around the world, including Genesis (France), the Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, and Revista de Investigaciones Literarias y Culturales (Venezuela). His edition and translation of the lost, original version of Aimé Césaire’s “…..Et les chiens se taisaient” is forthcoming from Duke Press.
10:00 am Saturday, April 15
Dr. Catherine Knight Steele, “Doing Digital Humanities with Radical Intentionality: Lesson from a Black Feminist Praxis of Care”
Catherine Knight Steele is an Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Maryland – College Park and was the Founding Director of the African American Digital Humanities Initiative (AADHum). She now directs the Black Communication and Technology lab (BCaT) as a part of the Digital Inquiry, Speculation, Collaboration, & Optimism Network funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She also directs the Digital Studies in Art & Humanities graduate certificate at the University of Maryland.
Her research focuses on race, gender, and media, with a specific emphasis on Black culture and discourse in new media. She examines representations of marginalized communities in the media and how groups resist oppression and practice joy using online technology to create spaces of community.
Catherine’s research on the Black blogosphere, digital discourses of resistance and joy, and digital Black feminism has been published in such journals as Social Media + Society, Information, Communication and Society, and Feminist Media Studies. She is the author of Doing Black Digital Humanities with Radical Intentionality (forthcoming, Routledge) and Digital Black Feminism (NYU Press 2021), which examines the relationship between Black women and technology as a centuries-long gendered and racial project in the U.S and was the 2022 winner of the Association of Internet Research Nancy Baym Book Award and Diamond Anniversary Book Award for the National Communication Association. Twitter: @SteeleCat717
Digital Humanities Against Dark Times was organized with support from the Mellon Foundation and The Vanderbilt College of Arts and Science. Additional cosponsors include The Office of the Provost for Arts and Libraries, American Studies, The Department of Art, The Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies, The Max Kade Center for European and German Studies, The Department of Classical and Mediterranean Studies, The Department of Communication Studies, The Department of English, The Department of History, The Philosophy Department, The Department of Sociology, The Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Vanderbilt University Press, The Vanderbilt University School of Nursing.