Faculty & Staff Resources

Publishing Without Walls - Illinois Open Publishing Network
I provide services in the form of an advisor, speaker, consultant, and as scholar of African American Literature and Digital Humanities specialist.

My work revolves around three specific initiatives:

(1) The centerpiece of our activities is an innovative curriculum developed by Marilyn Thomas Houston for a virtual institute entitled “Developing Scholarship in the Digital Age.” This gives us more instructional time and flexibility to offer the program to more people and with lower costs.

(2) Continuing digital publications, with a focus on projects in the pipeline, out-of-print novels by Black writers; and new proposals from participants in our continuing virtual institutes.

(3) A focused effort on capacity building to strengthen our capabilities for continue this work in the future.

Post45 Data Collective (Emory University)
The immediate motivation for the collective is that a group of scholars are separately producing data about contemporary literature, sometimes duplicating work, and this data—publishers; literary agents; prizes; race, gender, and MFA of authors—would be more powerful together than separate.

We will produce standards and protocols by which these datasets are peer reviewed and thus citable—a (still) innovative proposal for even existing digital humanities publications.

Our hope is that, by curating and annotating these metadata, we can further enable computational approaches to post45 literature and literary culture, supporting a growing number of scholars at the nexus of these exciting fields.

The Langston Hughes Review
I am the book review editor for this journal. In my role, I solicit book reviews from scholars related to Langston Hughes and Black poetry more broadly. I also edit submissions and recommend reviews for publication.

Howard University Mellon-Mays Undergraduate Research Fellowship
Since June 2018, I have served as the director of the Digital Humanities summer institute for Howard University's Mellon-Mays Undergraduate Fellowship.

The Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship is the centerpiece of the The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's initiative to increase diversity in the faculty ranks of institutions of higher learning. The MMUF at Howard University is administered by the Department of History on behalf of Howard University in partnership with The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The selection committee named the inaugural five-member class during the 2018 Spring Semester. The fellowship is a two-year training, mentoring, and research program for undergraduates who plan to enter PhD programs en route to the professorate. The Howard University MMUF is currently the only independent Mellon Mays Fellowship at an HBCU.

Space and Place in Africana/Black Studies: An Institute on Spatial Humanities Theories, Methods and Practice for Africana Studies (NEH Sponsored)
From June 5 – 26, I had the privilege to serve as institute faculty at the NEH funded “Space & Place in Africana/Black Studies” summer institute co-directed by Professors Kim Gallon (Purdue University) and Angel David Nieves (Hamilton College).

The institute brought together twenty early and mid-career Africana/Black Studies scholars, graduate students, librarians and archivists as a means of “bringing Africana/Black Studies scholars into the fold of digital humanities through the critical nexus of race and space. The Institute also prepared participants to view Black Digital Humanities as a way to challenge and transform discourse and activities across the humanities.”

My presentation addressed how geography can facilitate engagements with African American literature and digital humanities. Specifically, I focused on aspects of cultural geo-tagging (similar to my work on writer Edward P. Jones) as I explored 10 short stories by Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright and explain how quantitative data can assist in identifying a variety of stylistic features of the South and southern literature.

Faculty Development in the Digital Humanities Masterclass: A UNCF Mellon Funded Institute at Tougaloo College
Tougaloo College, with generous support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, will be hosting an Education Technology Masterclass, with special focus on the Digital Humanities. The two-week Masterclass will be held June 15-26.

With my expertise in the area of Digital Humanities, I would participated in the institute as a literary scientist. I engaged faculty in my research as well as facilitated workshops on productivity tools, applications, and trends in the digital humanities and research.