2022 Digital Humanities Teaching Team
Austin Mason
Director of Digital Arts and Humanities, Lecturer in History
Humanities Center
Carleton College
@meDHieval
I am founding Director of the Digital Arts & Humanities minor program, Assistant Director of the Humanities Center for Digital Humanities, and Lecturer in History at Carleton College. In this position, I teach courses in history and digital humanities and work with students, faculty and staff to build a robust Digital Humanities program that fosters both digital scholarship and pedagogy on campus.
I am an early medieval historian by training, with an interdisciplinary research agenda encompassing religious history, material culture, archaeology and the digital humanities. My current book project, “Listening to the Early Medieval Dead: Religious Practices in England, c.400-900 CE,” comes out of my doctoral dissertation, which I completed at Boston College in 2012. I leverage archaeological evidence (like bones, brooches, and buckets) and cutting-edge GIS mapping techniques to rewrite the history of the Anglo-Saxon conversion as a complex story of locally-negotiated, lived religious practices.
Beth Fischer
Post-doctoral Fellow for Digital Humanities
Williams College
@scribeth
I am the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities at the Williams College Museum of Art. I teach courses that use digital tools to examine art and museum collections, collaborate on ways to expand the digital resources and data available from the museum to make them more inclusive, and consult with faculty and staff on how to use digital methodologies in their research and teaching. At the heart of my role is the desire to find ways to use digital tools to help expand the ways people can work with objects in the museum, and to expand the stories we tell about the objects in our care.
My background is in medieval manuscripts, and my current research focuses on using digital models to explore the way medieval materials like gold and vellum react to different lighting conditions. My use of digital tools to inform my understanding of material conditions is behind my most recent publication, “Manuscript as Metalwork: Haptic Vision in Early Carolingian Gospel Books.” I also developed Visualizing Objects, Places, and Spaces: A Digital Humanities Handbook, an online resource that combines overviews on digital humanities project management and workflow with case studies and assignment examples submitted by digital humanities practitioners.
Nhora Serrano
Associate Director for Digital Innovation, Learning & Research
Burke Library
Hamilton College
Originally from Colombia, I am a trained Early Modern Comparative Literature scholar whose areas of focus include: Technology Enhanced Learning & Educational Innovation, Digital Humanities, History of Book History/Print Culture, Material Culture, Visual Studies (Editorial Cartoons & Comics), Latin America/Latinx, and Medieval And Renaissance Studies.
In 2018 I was selected to be a Mellon Press Diversity Fellow at the MIT Press/MIT. In 2017 I was selected as a 2018 Eisner Industry Awards judge. During the summer 2017, I was awarded a summer NEH Institute fellowship to participate in a 4-week seminar at the Newberry Library where I researched early 20th century Chicago Tribune cartoons. In 2014 I was awarded a Smithsonian National Postal Museum fellowship for my project on the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair postal cards and postage stamps and its relationship to editorial cartoons. My publications include “Illuminating Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red and The Museum of Innocence” for the MLA Approaches to Teaching Orhan Pamuk (2017), “Columbia and the Editorial Cartoon” in the Handbook of Comics Studies (Oxford Univ. Press 2020), and an edited anthology Immigrants and Comics: Graphic Spaces of Remembrance, Transaction, and Mimesis (Routledge 2021).
I am a founding member and currently the Treasurer of the Comics Studies Society, and presently serve on the MLA Executive Forum on Book History, Print Cultures, Lexicography and is the Forum’s elected Representative to the MLA Delegate Assembly. Previously, I was a Visiting Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Hamilton College, and a Visiting Scholar of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. From 2014-2018, I served on the MLA Executive Forum on Comics and Graphic Narratives.
José Vergara
Assistant Professor
Languages & Literatures
Bryn Mawr College
I teach a broad spectrum of courses on Russian language and culture (19th century through the present day). I specialize in and have published several articles on prose of the long 20th century with a focus on experimental works and contemporary culture. My book on literary responses to James Joyce is forthcoming in 2021 through Cornell University Press.
Generally speaking, I view myself as a collaborator and facilitator—Alison King’s “guide on the side”—rather than as an instructor in the strict sense of the word. By holding students to high standards and challenging them to see and develop alternative ways of thinking no matter the subject, I strive to aid them in their individual academic careers and personal goals. The interaction between text and context greatly informs my teaching methods. In my literature and culture classes, students are asked to consider both the peculiarities of the texts at hand, as well as the various circumstances that played a role in their creation. In this way, I endeavor to provide three main concepts: 1. knowledge of the texts along with relevant background developed through a combination of close reading, reflection, and discussion; 2. an understanding of various means of literary analysis; and 3. the awareness that each person can craft an interpretation and is not dependent on me for one “true” answer to any given question.
I am also very committed to outreach and the public humanities. To that end, I have taught in the Inside-Out Program, the Oakhill Prison Humanities Project, and the Pushkin Summer Institute to expand the horizon of Russian studies.
2022 DH Advisors and Subject Experts
Mackenzie Brooks
Associate Professor & Digital Humanities Librarian
Washington and Lee University
@WLUDH
Mark Sample
Associate Professor of Digital Studies
Davidson College
@samplereality
Student Support
2022 Student Course Developer
Sankeerthna Vedamtam, Bryn Mawr College ’22
2022 Student Teaching Assistant
Miyuki Mihira, Carleton College ’22