Participants

Agyei Archer

…is a type and graphic designer from Trinidad, with 11 years of experience across various communication design disciplines, including art direction, advertisement, experience design, website design and development, branding, and motion design. He is also a founding member and active member of the board of directors of Design Objective, Trinidad and Tobago’s professional graphic design organisation.

Catherine Benoît

…is a Professor of Anthropology at Connecticut College. Her research interests focus on questions related to migrations, border reinforcement and “deportation regimes” in the French overseas departments of the Caribbean and Indian Ocean.

Upasana Bhattacharjee

…is a student of Development Studies at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India. Her past research work has been around cyber security, public policy and machine learning. She is interested in Internet governance, information infrastructures, political theory and labour.

Benjamin Branch

…is the Deputy Campus Librarian at the University of West Indies, Mona Campus, Mona Library in Kingston, Jamaica. He is working to lead campus efforts and collaboration in Public, Outreach Services and Special Projects.

Lyndsay Bratton

…is the Director of Digital Scholarship at Connecticut College and a PhD Candidate in Art History at the University of Maryland. She leads the Digital Scholarship Fellows Program at Connecticut College, which supports faculty across disciplines in developing digital scholarship projects in collaboration with library staff and undergraduate students.

Robin Brooks

…is Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research and teaching interests include 20th and 21st century literature, particularly African-American, Caribbean, African, and American multiethnic literatures as well as feminist theories and postcolonial studies. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Florida, an MA in Afro American Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a BA in English from Florida State University. Before joining her current institution, she was a Diversity Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of San Diego and a Provost’s Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of South Florida.

Marlene L. Daut

…is Associate professor of African Diaspora Studies in the Carter G. Woodson Institute and the Program in American Studies at the University of Virginia. She is the author of two books: Baron de Vastey and the Origins of Black Atlantic Humanism (Palgrave, 2017) and Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789-1865 (Liverpool, 2015); and the forthcoming edited collection, An Anthology of Haitian Revolutionary Fictions (under contract with the University of Virginia Press). Her articles have appeared in scholarly journals such as, Studies in Romanticism, L’esprit créatur, Small Axe, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Comparative Literature, South Atlantic Review, Research in African Literatures, and J19. She is also co-editor and co-creator of H-Net’s scholarly network, H-Haiti and curates the websites, Haitian revolutionary fictions and La Gazette Royale. Follow her on Twitter @fictionsofHaiti.

Carole Boyce Davies

…is Professor of Africana Studies and English at Cornell University. Dr. Boyce Davies has published widely in the fields of African and Caribbean Studies with an emphasis on literature and culture, feminism and women’s writings and the theorizing of the African Diaspora.

Jarrel De Matas

…is a postgraduate student at the University of the West Indies, St Augustine Campus and a teacher of English Language and Literature. His research interests include Caribbean Speculative Fiction and Postmodern theory. He is published in the Journal of Comparative Politics, the Journal of West Indian Literature, and Small Axe.

Elizabeth Maddock Dillon

…is Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Department of English at Northeastern University and the founding Co-Director of the NULab for Maps, Texts, and Networks. She is the Co-Director of the Early Caribbean Digital Archive and one of the founders of the award-winning Our Marathon project: a crowd-sourced on-line archive of the Boston Marathon bombings. She is the recipient of an ACLS Digital Innovations Fellowship for her work on the Early Caribbean Digital Archive as well as NEH and Mellon fellowships for her research in Atlantic world studies. She is the author of New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1659-1859 (Duke University Press in 2014) which received the Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research from the American Society of Theatre Research and The Gender of Freedom: Fictions of Liberalism and the Literary Public Sphere (Stanford University Press, 2004). Together with Michael Drexler, she is co-editor of The Haitian Revolution and the Early U.S.: Histories, Geographies, and Textualities (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).

Jonathan Felix

…is a transdisciplinary educator and practitioner at the intersection of Design, Media, and Cultural Studies. His research interests include Alternative Media, Popular Culture and Digital Visual Discourses. With over 15 years of collective experience in the creative industries and higher education, he is currently a member of the faculty at the London College for Design and Fashion.

Sylvia Fernández

…is a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Houston and a Research Fellow with Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage. Her research is on US Latina/o literature with a focus on US/Mexico border, postcolonial feminist theory and digital humanities methods. She is the co-founder of Borderlands Archives Cartography, leads the Delis Negrón digital archive and collaborates in other DH projects.

Kaiama L. Glover

…is Professor of French and Africana Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. She is the author of Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon (Liverpool 2010); co-editor of Marie Vieux Chauvet: Paradoxes of the Postcolonial Feminine (Yale French Studies 2016) and of the forthcoming Haiti Reader (Duke UP); and translator of Frankétienne’s Ready to Burst (Archipelago Books 2014), Marie Chauvet’s Dance on the Volcano (Archipelago Books 2016), and René Depestre’s Hadriana in All My Dreams (Akashic Books 2017). She has won awards from the PEN/Heim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, and the Fulbright Foundation. She is founding co-editor of sx archipelagos: a small axe journal of digital practice and co-director of the digital humanities project In the Same Boats: Toward an Afro-Atlantic Intellectual Cartography. She contributes regularly to The New York Times Book Review. Her manuscript “Disorderly Women: On Caribbean Community and the Ethics of Self-Regard,” a monograph concerning literary representations of wayward womanhood in Caribbean prose fiction is forthcoming with Duke University Press.

Tao Leigh Goffe

…is an assistant professor / faculty fellow of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. In 2019, she will begin a joint appointment as an assistant professor of Africana Studies and Feminist, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at Cornell University. Specializing in the enmeshed vernaculars that emerge from histories of imperialism, migration, and globalization, her first book examines the intersections of visual, sonic, food, and ghost cultures. Her research is preoccupied with how the history of abolition, indenture, and decolonization frame the transpacific and transatlantic entanglements of African and Asian diasporas.

Jeanne Jégousso

…is a Ph.D. Candidate in French Studies with a double minor in Anthropology and Comparative Literature at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, LA, where she works as webmaster, graphic designer, and public relation manager for the Center for French and Francophone Studies. Her work has been published in peer-reviewed journals, she has organized interdisciplinary panels at national and international conferences, and she co-directed the film Au jour le jour, which portrayed the quotidian realities of Haitians living in Port-au Prince during the Presidential election of 2014. Her academic interests include Oceanic Studies, French and Francophone Literature, and Postcolonial Studies. Her current research focuses on utilizing Édouard Glissant’s theoretical concepts to analyze the literary works of contemporary Caribbean authors.

Kwynn Johnson

…is a Visual Artist and a Haitian Studies scholar. Johnson’s scholarship has been published in a number of peer-reviewed academic journals. Since 2003 she has had 8 solo art exhibitions, and has exhibited locally, regionally and internationally. She is a Lecturer at The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine. Her areas of research are in the field of Haitian Studies, place and meaning in contemporary Caribbean Cultural geography, and the practice-based research methodology. Since 2007, Johnson has archived and curated a number of private heritage collections and exhibitions.

Leslie Kay Jones

…is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Sociology and a Graduate Fellow at the Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy. Her fields of expertise are race and gender, Black feminist thought, online social media, and collective morbilization. Leslie’s dissertation argues that Black women are forming intellectual salons on digital social media platforms, where they are making groundbreaking theoretical contributions toward the public understanding of race and gender. Leslie is also a coordinator of the Digital Sociology Mini-Conference at the Eastern Sociological Society annual meeting, which aims to foster a community of sociologists invested in critical digital studies work.

Julie Chun Kim

…is Associate Professor of English at Fordham University. She has published essays on Afro-Caribbean medicine, indigenous land rights, natural history, and early Caribbean plantation economies. She is currently working on a book entitled Gardening at the Edge of Empire: Colonial Botany in the Revolutionary Caribbean, which examines the multiple and contradictory experiments in plant science, writing, art, and politics that took place at the royal botanic garden in late eighteenth-century St. Vincent. She is also co-leader of Digital Grainger: An Online Edition of the Sugar-Cane (1764), an ongoing project to digitize James Grainger’s 1764 poem The Sugar-Cane.

V. Emma Kioko

…is currently a PhD student in English at Cornell University with research and teaching interests in contemporary African literature, diaspora studies, law, and the digital humanities. Her current research emerges at the intersections of law and literatures studies; the project deploys theories of legal property in order to rethink notions of diasporic belonging and space.

Halcyon M. Lawrence

…is an assistant professor of technical communication and information design at Towson University. A native of Trinidad and Tobago, her research focuses on speech intelligibility and the design of speech technologies for under-represented and marginalized populations. Her latest publication, titled, “Siri’s Imperialist Reign” is part of an edited collection, Your Computer is on Fire, due out in early 2019 and published by MIT Press.

Amalia Levi

…is an archivist and cultural heritage professional currently residing in Barbados. She is the founding director of The HeritEdge Connection, a non-profit organization dedicated to forging collaborations, connecting people, resources, and institutions through cultural heritage projects. Most recently, Amalia has teamed with the Barbados Archives and was awarded an Endangered Archives Programme grant through the British Library to digitize the historic newspaper The Barbados Mercury. Previously, she completed the archival processing and digitization of the records of the Synagogue Restoration Project in Bridgetown, Barbados. Amalia holds an MLS with a concentration in Archives, and an M.A. in History with a concentration in Jewish Studies, both from the University of Maryland; an M.A. in Museum Studies from Yildiz University in Istanbul, Turkey; and a B.A. in Archaeology and History of Art from the University of Athens, Greece. She has worked in museums, developing exhibits, and conducting archival research, and was the founding curator of the Jewish Museum of Turkey in Istanbul. Amalia is interested in augmenting historical scholarship on diasporas and underrepresented populations through linking and enriching dispersed collections through Linked Data principles and collections-as-data approaches. For a full CV, please see https://hcommons.org/members/amaliasl/. Website: www.archiveland.com; twitter: @amaliasl

Elizabeth Losh

…is an Associate Professor of American Studies at William & Mary with a specialization in New Media Ecologies. She organized the 2017 Race, Memory, and the Digital Humanities conference in conjunction with the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. In addition to two monographs about the politics of digital culture from MIT Press, she is the co-editor – with Jacqueline Wernimont – of the forthcoming volume in the Debates in the Digital Humanities book series from the University of Minnesota Press entitled Bodies of Information: Intersectional Feminist and Digital Humanities, which includes a series of ground-breaking essays about postcolonial digital humanities, Black digital humanities, queer digital humanities, and decolonizing archival practices. She has also taught feminist digital humanities at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute for the past five years and has published in the field of digital humanities for the past two decades. In rethinking what counts as “infrastructure,” she has also written a number of frequently cited essays about communities that produce, consume, and circulate hashtags, online video and digital photographs, text postings, and programming code. Much of this body of work concerns the legitimation of political institutions through visual evidence, representations of war and violence, and discourses about human rights.

Lizabel Mónica

…is a writer and a PhD Candidate in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese at Princeton University. She is currently working on her dissertation project “Digital Entanglements in Cuban Literature, Visual Arts, and Music,” which includes the creation of an archive of Cuban digital ephemera. She has recently published the articles “El Paquete’s Art Gallery” at the online journal Cuban Counterpoints (2017) and “El cuerpo machacado: una lectura actual de la novela La carne de René”, in Cuerpos ilegales. Sujeto, poder y escritura en América Latina (Ediciones Almenara, Comp. Nanne Timmer, 2018).

Angelique V. Nixon

…is a Bahamas-born, Trinidad-based writer, artist, teacher, scholar, activist, and poet. Her research, poetry, and artwork have been published/featured widely. She is author of the art and poetry chapbook Saltwater Healing – A Myth Memoir & Poems (Poinciana Paper Press, 2013). Her scholarly book Resisting Paradise: Tourism, Diaspora, and Sexuality in Caribbean Culture (University Press of Mississippi, 2015) won the Caribbean Studies Association’s 2016 Barbara T. Christian Award for Best Book in the Humanities. Angelique is a Lecturer at the Institute for Gender and Development Studies, The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago. Follow her on Twitter/Instagram @sistellablack. http://consciousvibration.tumblr.com/ | http://www.caribbeansexualities.org/

Emily O’Dell

…is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at Louisiana State University. In addition to her involvement with the Library of Glissant Studies project, she is also the current president of the Graduate Student Caucus of the Modern Languages and an instructor of World Literature and Folklore at LSU.

Tzarina T. Prater

…is an Associate Professor of English in Bentley University’s English and Media Studies Department where she teaches African American and Anglophone Caribbean literature as well as Gender and Cultural Studies. She has published articles on the work of Easton Lee, Kerry Young, Michelle Cliff, Patricia Powell, U.S. spectatorship of Hong Kong action cinema, digital platforms, and science fiction. She is currently working on her book project on Chinese Jamaican literary and cultural production entitled Labrish and Mooncakes: National Belonging in Chinese Jamaican Cultural Production.

Alanna Prince

…is a graduate student studying English Literature at Northeastern University in Boston. Her work centers around contemporary Black literature, feminism, and visual culture. Prince received her BA in Art & Visual Culture and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Bates College in 2013. Prince acts the Project Manager of the Early Caribbean Digital Archive where she takes a particular interest in representation and visual culture of the Caribbean as well as metadata and meta-archival discourses.

Roopika Risam

…is Assistant Professor of English and Faculty Fellow for Digital Library Initiatives at Salem State University. Her book New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy will be published by Northwestern University Press in November 2018. Risam’s digital humanities projects include The Harlem Shadows Project, Social Justice and Digital Humanities, and Visualizing the Global Du Bois. Her work has appeared in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Left History, and Popular Communications, among others.

Leah Rosenberg

…is associate professor of English at the University of Florida, where she teaches postcolonial and Caribbean studies as well as digital humanities. She is the author of Nationalism and the Formation of Caribbean Literature (2007) and co-editor with J. Dillon Brown of Beyond Windrush: Rethinking Postwar West Indian Literature(2015). She currently is at work on a cultural and political history of Caribbean tourism from 1890 to the present. She also serves as co-chair of the scholarly advisory board for the Digital Library of the Caribbean.

Jamillah Scott-Branch

…is the Assistant Director at North Carolina Central University. She has over 10 years of experience in library leadership and is leading campus efforts in open educational resources.

Katerina Gonzalez Seligmann

…is a writer and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Writing, Literature, & Publishing at Emerson College. She holds a BA (2005) from Columbia University, and an MA (2012) and PhD (2015) in Comparative Literature from Brown University. She is currently completing her first book manuscript, Constructing the Caribbean: How Literary Magazines Incubated a Region. She has also recently published the article “Productions of Cultural Combat in Tropiques” in the South Atlantic Quarterly Special Issue on Aimé Césaire (2016) and co-edited a Special Issue on Nicolás Guillén of the CLR James Journal (2015).

Isis Semaj-Hall

…is a decolonial feminist, and cultural analyst. Shaped by her Jamaican childhood and New York adolescence, she has written essays and commentaries on a wide range of topics including sound studies, remix theory, Rihanna, Ishawna, Edwidge Danticat, Marlon James, dub, and dancehall. Semaj-Hall is co-founder and editor of PREE: Caribbean Writing online magazine, author of the “write pon di riddim” blog, and as an assistant professor she explores gender studies, hero fiction, reggae poetry, and popular culture at the University of the West Indies, Mona.

Ranjani Srinivasan

…is a student of English Studies at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Madras. She has authored papers on Chinese Internet and domestic politics, with focus on the concept of ‘cyber-sovereignty’. Her interests lie in international relations theory, foreign policy and Internet governance.

Miari Taina Stephens

…is a Nuyorican from Brooklyn, NY. She is a third year PhD candidate at Harvard University in African & African American Studies with a focus in Social Anthropology. Her research interests include: cyber feminisms; the racialized, gendered and classed politics of beauty and aesthetics in the Americas–and specifically the Caribbean; and black women’s social media movements and community organizing.

Chelsea Stieber

…is Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. She recently finished a yearlong fellowship at the John W. Kluge center at the Library of Congress, where she worked on her book manuscript about civil war and post-independence writing in Haiti, entitled “Haiti’s Paper War: Post-Independence Writing, Civil War, and the Making of the Republic, 1804–1954.” She has taught a range of courses in French and English, including “Pirates of the Caribbean in Atlantic Literature,” “Caribbean Fascism,” and “Maurrassisme et catholicisme en France.” She has published articles in French Studies and Francosphères, as well as in edited volumes. She created the RSHHGG Lab project in conjunction with the National Digital Initiatives at the Library of Congress and the Société Haïtienne d’Histoire de Géographie et de Géologie in order increase the impact of this important repository of scholarly research published in Haiti by facilitating the work of scholars of Haiti in the US, Haiti, and beyond. You can find her on academia.edu and on twitter @chelseastieber.

Kimberly Takahata

…is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Her dissertation, entitled, “Skeletal Testimony: Bony Biopolitics in the Early Atlantic, 1705-1836,” analyzes descriptions of indigenous bones in the eighteenth century to articulate a relationship between colonial texts and ongoing indigenous life. She is a team member of Digital Grainger: An Online Edition of The Sugar-Cane (1764), an ongoing project to digitize James Grainger’s 1764 poem The Sugar-Cane.

Laurie Taylor

…is UF’s Digital Scholarship Librarian. Her work focuses on socio-technical (people, policies, technologies, communities) needs for scholarly cyberinfrastructure. She works closely with the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) where she is the Digital Scholarship Director, the LibraryPress@UF where she is the Editor-in-Chief, the Digital Humanities Working Group, and the DH Graduate Certificate, and Research Computing with these and other activities geared towards enabling a culture of radical collaboration that values and supports diversity, equity, and inclusivity.

Bryan Wagner

…is an associate professor in the English Department and American Studies Program at the University of California, Berkeley. His books include Disturbing the Peace: Black Culture and the Police Power after Slavery (Harvard, 2009), The Tar Baby: A Global History (Princeton, 2017), The Wild Tchoupitoulas (Bloomsbury, 2019), and The Life and Legend of Bras-Coupé: The Fugitive Slave Who Fought the Law, Ruled the Swamp, Danced at Congo Square, Invented Jazz, and Died for Love (LSU, 2019).

Gary Wilder

…is Director of the Committee on Globalization and Social Change and Professor in the Ph.D. Programs of Anthropology, History, and French at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Duke University Press, 2015) and The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism Between the World Wars (University of Chicago Press, 2005). In Spring 2018 he co-authored Theses on Theory and History, an open source digital publication, with Ethan Kleinberg and Joan Wallach Scott. He is currently completing a book of essays on temporality and solidarity entitled “Untimely History, Unhomely Times” and working on a book about black radical humanism in the Atlantic world entitled “More Abundant Life.”

Annette Zapata

…is a Ph.D. candidate and teaching fellow at the University of Houston. Her research interests focus on US Latinx literature, Latinx children & YA literature, immigration and digital humanities through a postcolonial framework. She is currently a collaborator on the Delis Negrón Digital Archive, the forthcoming initiative United Fronteras and various projects with Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage and the #usLdh initiative.

Amanda Zilla

…is a second year MPhil in Literatures in English candidate and tutor in the Department of Literary, Cultural and Communication Studies at The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine. Her thesis is entitled “A Narratological Study of the Adaptation of Caribbean Literary Texts into Film and Virtual Reality.