Appendix: Commissioners and Project Team

Edward L. Ayers, Tucker-Boatwright Professor of the Humanities and Executive Director of New American History, University of Richmond Edward Ayers is the author of eight books, has won the Bancroft and Lincoln Prizes for his scholarship, been named National Professor of the Year, received the National Humanities Medal from President Obama at the White House, served as president of the Organization of American Historians, and was the founding board chair of the American Civil War Museum. He is president emeritus at the University of Richmond, where he serves as executive director of New American History and Bunk, dedicated to making the nation’s history more visible and useful for a broad range of audiences. His latest book is American Visions: The United States, 1800-1860 (W.W. Norton, 2023)

Lisa Brooks, Winthrop H. Smith 1916 Professor of American Studies and English at Amherst College Lisa Brooks is the Winthrop H. Smith 1916 Professor of American Studies and English at Amherst College, where she enjoys working with undergraduate students on digital humanities projects. She is the author of The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast (University of Minnesota Press, 2008) and Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War (Yale University Press, 2018), which received several awards, including the Bancroft Prize for American History and Diplomacy and the New England Society Book Award for Historical Nonfiction. Brooks collaborated with multiple students and the irL humanities lab to create the digital companion to Our Beloved Kin, which invites engagement through multiple digital pathways and features innovative maps, place-based images and archival documents. She has also collaborated on community-engaged and digital projects, including the Digital Archives of Native American Petitions in Massachusetts and Mapping Native Intellectual Networks of the Northeast. She has been honored to pursue archival research, place-based writing and digital projects as a Whiting Public Engagement Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, an ACLS Fellow and, most recently, as the Mellon Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the American Antiquarian Society.

Kim Christen, Associate Vice President, Research Advancement, Washington State University Kim Christen is the Associate Vice President for Research Advancement and Partnerships at Washington State University. She is a Professor in the Department of Digital Technology and Culture, and she was the director of the Center for Digital Scholarship and Curation at WSU for the last eight years and she continues to support the center as a Faculty Research Associate. Her research and scholarship explore the intersections of data management, software systems, and information ethics specifically addressing issues of access, use and reuse of cultural heritage and traditional knowledge in global network. Her work has been published widely in international journals. Dr. Christen is the founder of Mukurtu CMS an open-source software platform designed with Indigenous communities globally to meet their unique information, curatorial, and data needs. She is a co-Director of Local Contexts, a global initiative to provide digital tools and legal frameworks for stewarding digital cultural heritage and the management of intellectual property by Indigenous communities. Dr. Christen collaborates broadly emphasizing community-engaged research including working closely with Native American nations across Washington state and nationally as well as with Indigenous communities globally to build digital tools and networks as catalysts for social change.

Dan Cohen, Vice Provost for Information Collaboration, Dean of the Library, and Professor of History, Northeastern University Dan Cohen is the Vice Provost for Information Collaboration, Dean of the Library, and Professor of History at Northeastern University. His work has focused on the impact of digital media and technology on all aspects of knowledge and learning, from the nature of libraries and their evolving resources, to twenty-first century research techniques and software tools, to the changing landscape of communication and publication. He has directed major initiatives that have helped to shape that future. Prior to his tenure at Northeastern, he was the founding Executive Director of the Digital Public Library of America, which brought together the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and made them freely available to the world.

Before DPLA, Dan was a Professor of History in the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University and the Director of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. There he oversaw projects ranging from the September 11 Digital Archive to the popular Zotero research tool.

Maria E. Cotera, Associate Professor of Mexican American and Latino Studies, University of Texas—Austin.

Maria Eugenia Cotera is an associate professor in the Mexican American and Latino Studies Department at the University of Texas—Austin. She holds a PhD from Stanford University’s Program in Modern Thought, and an MA in English from the University of Texas. Her first book, Native Speakers: Ella Deloria, Zora Neale Hurston, Jovita González, and the Poetics of Culture, (University of Texas Press, 2008) received the Gloria Anzaldúa book prize for 2009 from the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA). Her edited volume (with Dionne Espinoza and Maylei Blackwell), Chicana Movidas: New Narratives of Feminism and Activism in the Movement Era (University of Texas Press, 2018) has been adopted in courses across the country. Professor Cotera is the co-founder and project director of the Chicana por mi Raza Digital Memory Collective, an online interactive archive of oral histories and material culture documenting Chicana Feminist praxis over the Long Civil Rights period. She has curated several public history exhibits, including Las Rebeldes: Stories of Strength and Struggle in southeast Michigan (2013) and Chicana Fotos: Nancy De Los Santos (2017) and currently serves as an advisor/consultant for numerous large-scale digital public humanities projects focusing on the Latinx experience.

Meredith R. Evans, PhD, Director of Special Collections and Museum, Atlanta, GA

Meredith Evans is a manager of cultural heritage and since the fall of 2015 has been the appointed director of the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum, administered by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). She is the first African American woman to direct a Presidential Library. As director she focuses on civic engagement, the role of the presidency and public policy, and making accessible the records of President Carter, his Cabinet, the White House administration and Mrs. Rosalyn Carter. Evans has expertise in selection, acquisition and preservation of print, audio, visual and digital collections, management, library-wide staff development, fundraising, and community engagement. She is the 74th President and a Fellow of the Society of American Archivists and holds an additional Presidential appointment as a member of the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC). She has worked in academia for over 20 years and written on the role and value of museums, libraries and archives. Evans earned a master of library science from Clark Atlanta University and master’s degree in public history at North Carolina State University and a doctorate from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Maryemma Graham, Distinguished Professor Emerita, University of Kansas, Founder, History of Black Writing

Maryemma Graham, University Distinguished Professor Emerita at the University of Kansas, is best known as the founding director of the History of Black Writing (1983-2021). Her leading initiatives to promote research, teaching, and public engagement with Black literary studies, and successful track record with funding from the NEH, the Ford, and Mellon Foundations have made HBW a major center for literary recovery, archival preservation, and the early use of interactive technologies. Part of an expanded network of digital scholars and practitioners who are creating new knowledge networks that engage multiple audiences, Graham is also a widely known author/editor of 12 books that have helped to redefine the field, especially The Cambridge History of African American Literature with Jerry W. Ward, Jr. The House Where My Soul Lives: The Life of Margaret Walker, the first complete biography of the twentieth-century poet, novelist, and institution builder was published in 2022.

Josh Greenberg, Program Director, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation

Josh Greenberg is a Program Director at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, where he is responsible for overseeing the Technology and New York City programs. He established the Technology program after joining the Foundation in 2010, and has since developed a portfolio of grants seeking to advance data science, data curation, citizen science, scholarly communication, collaboration platforms, and open source software. He received his BA in History of Science, Medicine and Technology from Johns Hopkins University, and an MA and PhD degrees from Cornell University’s Department of Science & Technology Studies. Before working at the Sloan Foundation, he was the New York Public Library’s first Director of Digital Strategy and Scholarship, where he founded and led the Digital Experience Group and the NYPL Labs team. Prior to that, he was Associate Director for Research Projects at George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media. He currently serves on the National Academies’ Board on Research Data and Information and the ACLS Commission on Fostering and Sustaining Diverse Digital Scholarship, and he is a Board Advisor for Code for Science and Society; previous board service includes the American Geophysical Union, the Center for Open Science, and the Metropolitan Library Council.

May Hong HaDuong, Associate University Librarian and Director, UCLA Film & Television Archive

May Hong HaDuong joined the UCLA Film & Television Archive as its fourth director in 2021. Previously, she oversaw access to the collection of the Academy Film Archive for 13 years. Her connection to UCLA began as a graduate of the UCLA Moving Image Archive Studies program and then as the project manager for the Outfest UCLA Legacy Project for LGBTQ Moving Image Preservation, a collaboration between the UCLA Film & Television Archive and Outfest to collect and preserve queer moving images. HaDuong currently serves on the National Film Preservation Board, the Board of Directors of the ONE Institute, UCLA Chancellor’s Council on the Arts, and UCLA’s Community Engagement Advisors Network.

Charles J. Henry, President, Council on Library and Information Resources

Charles Henry is the President of the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). Before coming to CLIR, he was the Vice Provost and University Librarian at Rice University. He served as publisher of Rice University Press, the nation’s first all-digital university press; and was a member of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Commission on Cyberinfrastructure in the Humanities and Social Sciences. He is currently on the Board of Trustees of Tan Tao University in Vietnam and serves as co-PI of the Digital Library of the Middle East. Henry has written dozens of publications and has received numerous grants and awards, including from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, and the J. Paul Getty Trust. He received a Fulbright senior scholar grant for library sciences in New Zealand and more recently in China, and a Fulbright award for the study of medieval literature in Vienna, Austria. He holds a PhD in comparative literature from Columbia University and is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Bergis Jules, Archivist, Shift Collective

Bergis Jules is an archivist and a founding member of Shift Collective, a non-profit consulting and design group that helps organizations better engage, collaborate with, and reflect their local communities. As an advocate for community-based archives, he is interested in developing solutions that can grow the capacity and achieve long term sustainability in these types of cultural memory organizations, and especially those that focus on documenting the lives of marginalized people in our society. He is also passionate about incorporating ethics and care into how we collect and preserve digital content from the web and social media about people that are most vulnerable to harm in those spaces. Bergis is a co-founder and project director for Documenting the Now, which seeks to develop digital tools and best practices that support the ethical collection, preservation, and use of web and social media content, and a co-founder of Archiving the Black Web, an initiative aimed at growing web archiving skills of Black archivists and memory workers, and increasing the quantity, quality, and accessibility of web archive collections that can support the study and further documentation of the Black experience. He received a master’s degree in library and information science with a Specialization in Archives and Records Management and a master’s degree in African American and African Diaspora Studies from Indiana University. Bergis uses he/him pronouns.

Marisa Parham, Professor of English and Digital Studies, University of Maryland

Marisa Parham is Professor of English and Digital Studies at the University of Maryland, where she is PI and director of the African American Digital and Experimental Humanities initiative (AADHUM) and is associate director for the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH). Parham also serves as a Leader-in-Residence for the Breaking the M.O.L.D. Initiative, which develops “a diverse set of leaders… shaped by arts and humanities’ scholarly values and distinct skills.” Parham holds a PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University and is the author of several books and edited volumes. She is also the writer, designer, and programmer for numerous digital essays, crowdsourced arts experiments, and physical computing projects. Recent examples of this work include Material Conditions 01, co-curated with Cassandra Hradil and Andrew W. Smith for the 2022 Wrong Biennale and the digital-interactive scholarly essay .break .dance, which is also anthologized in the Electronic Literature Collection (ELC4) and was a 2021 honorable mention for the N. Katherine Hayles award from the Electronic Literature Organization. Prior to arriving at UMD Parham was Professor of English and Faculty Diversity and Inclusion Officer at Amherst College, and a former director of Five College Digital Humanities.

Kenton Rambsy, Associate Professor of English/Data Science and Analytics, Howard University

Kenton Rambsy is an Associate Professor of African American literature at Howard University, with a dual appointment in The Center for Applied Data Science and Analytics (CADSA) as a data storytelling specialist. He earned his PhD in English from the University of Kansas in May 2015 and graduated Magna Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa from Morehouse College in 2010. Rambsy’s research focuses on 20th and 21st century African American short fiction, Hip Hop, and book history. His 2022 book, The Geographies of African American Short Stories, explores the nuanced literary art of African American short fiction, examining how writers depict characters navigating diverse social and physical environments. His ongoing Digital Humanities projects leverage datasets to highlight significant trends and thematic shifts in black literature and music. Dr. Rambsy is also the author of #TheJayZMixtape (2018) and Lost in the City: An Exploration of Edward P. Jones’s Short Fiction (2019), which connect directly to his research interests by illuminating recurring themes in black creative works. A 2018 recipient of the Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowship, in 2021, he co-founded The Literary Data Gallery, an online platform funded by the Mellon Foundation that showcases data-driven visualizations of Black creative works and artists.

K.J. Rawson, Professor of English & Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Director of the Humanities Center, Northeastern University

K.J. Rawson is Professor of English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Northeastern University where he also serves as Director of the Humanities Center. He is the founder and director of the Digital Transgender Archive, an award-winning online repository of trans-related historical materials, and he is the chair of the editorial board of the Homosaurus, an international LGBTQ linked data vocabulary. His work is at the intersections of the Digital Humanities and Rhetoric, LGBTQ+, and Feminist Studies. Focusing on archives as key sites of cultural power, Rawson studies the rhetorical work of queer and transgender archival collections in both brick-and-mortar and digital spaces. He has co-edited special issues of Peitho and TSQ and he co-edited Rhetorica in Motion: Feminist Rhetorical Methods and Methodologies (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010). Rawson’s scholarship has appeared in Archivaria, Enculturation, Peitho, Present Tense, QED, RSQ, TSQ, and several edited collections.

Roopika Risam, Associate Professor of Digital Humanities and Social Engagement, Dartmouth College

Roopika Risam is Chair of Film and Media Studies and Associate Professor of Digital Humanities and Social Engagement at Dartmouth College. Her research focuses on data histories, ethics, and practices at intersections of postcolonial and African diaspora studies, digital humanities, and critical university studies. Risam’s work in digital humanities has been supported by over $4.3 million in grants from funders including the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Mellon Foundation. She is the author of New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy (2019), and has edited multiple volumes, including Intersectionality in Digital Humanities (2019) and The Digital Black Atlantic (2021) in the Debates in the Digital Humanities series at University of Minnesota Press. Risam is co-founding editor-in-chief of Reviews in Digital Humanities, a journal that peer reviews digital humanities scholarship. She is also director of the Digital Ethnic Futures Consortium, which supports initiatives in digital humanities and ethnic studies at under resourced higher education institutions. From 2022-2024, Risam served as president of the Association of Computers and the Humanities. She recently received the 2023 Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Award from the International Association for Research in Service Learning and Community Engagement.

Claire Stewart, Professor and Juanita J. and Robert E. Simpson Dean of Libraries and University Librarian, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Claire Stewart is Professor and Juanita J. and Robert E. Simpson Dean of Libraries and University Librarian at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Before joining Illinois, Stewart served as Professor and Dean of Libraries at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL), Associate University Librarian for Research and Learning at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, and held several positions at Northwestern University over a 21-year period, including director of the Center for Scholarly Communication and Digital Curation and head of Digital Collections. Stewart’s scholarly interests include information policy and curation structures. She has published and presented on copyright, open access, open-source software development, digital humanities, data management, curation and preservation. She has been an active leader through committees of the Big Ten Academic Alliance, Association of Research Libraries, and American Council of Learned Societies, and currently serves as Past Chair of the Board of Governors for the HathiTrust digital library partnership. Stewart holds a Bachelor of Arts in English literature with a minor in humanistic studies from St. Mary’s College and a Master of Library and Information Science from Dominican University.

Gabriela Baeza Ventura, Professor of Spanish, Department of Hispanic Studies, University of Houston; Deputy Director, Arte Público Press; Director, Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage Program; Co-Director, US Latino Digital Humanities Center

Gabriela Baeza Ventura is professor of Spanish with a specialization on US Latinx literature in the Department of Hispanic Studies at the University of Houston. She is deputy director at Arte Público Press, the premier US Latino publishing house, director of the Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage Program, and co-director of the US Latino Digital Humanities Center. Her research covers various aspects of US Latino literature and digital humanities including women, immigration, recovered literature, and YA and children’s literary production. Her publications include the monograph: La imagen de la mujer en las crónicas del “México de afuera;” two anthologies: Con otra Mirada. Cuentos hispanos de los Estados Unidos and US Latino Literature Today: Anthology of Contemporary Latino Literature; an edition of the collected works of Chicana-renowned poet, Angela de Hoyos. She also co-edited and introduced three collections of essays on Central American literature, Recovering the US Hispanic Literature, and US Latino Journals and Newspapers. Baeza Ventura is a member of the following committees on scholarly digital editions: Next-Generation Historical and Scholarly Digital Editions, National Historical Publications and Records Commission and the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Mellon-ACLS Commission on Fostering and Sustaining Diverse Digital Scholarship.

Ben Vinson III, President, Howard University

Ben Vinson III is the 18th president of Howard University and a tenured professor of history in the University’s College of Arts and Sciences. As president, he is tasked with inspiring, innovating, and strategically leading the Howard community which include undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, and staff. Vinson was most recently provost and executive vice president at Case Western Reserve University. He is an accomplished historian of Latin America, and the recipient of the 2019 Howard F. Cline Book Prize in Mexican History for his book, “Before Mestizaje: The Frontiers of Race and Caste in Colonial Mexico.” Prior to his appointments at Howard and CWRU, Vinson also served on the faculties of Barnard College and Penn State before joining Johns Hopkins as a professor of history and founding director of its Center for Africana Studies. At Johns Hopkins, he served as a vice dean for centers, interdisciplinary studies and graduate education before becoming dean of George Washington University’s Columbian College of Arts and Sciences. Vinson earned a bachelor’s degree from Dartmouth College and a doctorate from Columbia University.

Charles Watkinson, Director, University of Michigan Press, and Associate University Librarian, Publishing, University of Michigan Library

Charles Watkinson oversees the Publishing division of the University of Michigan Library. This includes being director of the University of Michigan Press, which publishes around 100 books a year; oversight of a publishing services unit that hosts the works of other publishers on its Fulcrum open-source platform; and oversight of the Deep Blue repository and research data services unit. With a background in archaeology and anthropology, Charles has a strong commitment to digital preservation and is interested in issues of ownership, access, and credit. His publishing career includes positions in commercial and society publishing, as well as within university presses and libraries. He has recently served as president of the Association of University Presses and has also been on the Board of the Society for Scholarly Publishing. He was an initiator of the Library Publishing Coalition and is on the Boards of the OAPEN Foundation and Open Access Book Data Trust, which both advance open access book publishing.

Stacie Williams, Archives and Libraries

Stacie Williams is trained in myriad aspects of archives management and librarianship, including metadata creation, public services, collection development, digitization, repository management, digital infrastructure, and strategic planning. She has experience working in academic, public, research, corporate/special, government, and community-based libraries and archives. Additionally, she is an award-winning reporter and copy editor, thorough researcher, and effective interviewer, with experience writing and editing investigative stories, hard news, features, Q&As, reviews, and briefs. Her work has been published in the Chicago Review of Books, Medium’s “Human Parts” series, Belt magazine, Gordon Square Review, Midnight Breakfast, VICE, Racked, New York magazine, The Nation, LitHub, The Rumpus, The Toast, Fourculture, and Catapult. Her bibliomemoir, Bizarro Worlds, is part of the AFTERWORDS series published by Fiction Advocate in 2018. Williams graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2001 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Journalism (JBA). She also holds a Master of Science degree in Library Science and a concentration in Archives Management from Simmons College’s Graduate School of Library and Information Sciences.

Jewon Woo, Professor of English, Lorain County Community College

Jewon Woo is a professor of English at Lorain County Community College, Ohio. She teaches African American, American, and Women’s literatures, as well as Black Digital Humanities. Her research includes topics such as Black Print Culture, Black periodicals, performance, 19th-century American culture and literature, community-based pedagogy, pedagogy for under-represented students, and digital humanities. Recently, she published a digital humanities project titled Ohio’s Black Newspapers in the 19th Century, with support from the ACLS, NEH, and Mellon Foundation. She currently serves as a JT Mellon Satellite Partner at the Center for Black Digital Research at Penn State University, contributing her expertise in reading old Black newspapers to the Colored Conventions Project. Woo holds a PhD in English and Studies in Africa and African Diaspora from the University of Minnesota.

Carol A. Mandel is Dean Emerita of New York University Libraries. She has served on the boards of many groups concerned with access and preservation, including the Association of Research Libraries, the Digital Library Federation, the Digital Preservation Network, HathiTrust, Ithaka Harbors, and the Library of Congress National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program; she currently serves as Vice Chair of the Board of the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). Her writing and related work focuses on issues and strategies for sustaining the many new forms of valuable content that are digital only, and that are eluding traditional approaches to collection and stewardship.

James Shulman serves as vice president and chief operating officer of ACLS. His latest book is The Synthetic University; How Higher Education Can Benefit from Shared Solutions and Save Itself (Princeton University Press, 2023). From its founding in 2001 to 2016 he was president of Artstor. At the Mellon Foundation in the 1990s, he collaborated with William G. Bowen and Derek Bok on The Shape of the River: Long-term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions. He also wrote (with William G. Bowen), The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values.

Dr. Katrina Fenlon is an assistant professor at the University of Maryland College of Information. She is a faculty affiliate of the University of Maryland Center for Archival Futures and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities. Her research focuses on the sustainability and preservation of digital scholarship and broader infrastructures for cultural, scholarly, and scientific knowledge, ranging from digital community archives to data repositories. Her work aims to support research communities and knowledge organizations creating long-lived, impactful digital collections, which in turn support the advancement of knowledge and the endurance of communities. She earned her master’s and PhD in Library and Information Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Zoe LeBlanc is an assistant professor in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, specializing in digital humanities and the histories of information. She is co-authoring Data Work in the Humanities with Meredith Martin and developing Informing the Third World, a digital project on anti-colonial information infrastructures. Zoe is actively engaged in several collaborative initiatives, including serving as a founding member of the Cultural Analytics Teaching and Research Initiative, the Principal Investigator for the Coding DH Project, a Trustee and Technical Lead for The Programming Historian, and a founding member of the SSHRC-funded Non-Aligned News Agency Research Project. Previously, she was a Postdoctoral Associate and Weld Fellow at Princeton University’s Center for Digital Humanities and a digital humanities developer at the Scholars’ Lab at the University of Virginia. She earned her PhD in History from Vanderbilt University in 2019.

Keyanah Nurse is the senior program officer for Intentional Design for an Equitable Academy (IDEA) Programs, where she leads the Digital Justice Grants Program and co-leads the Intention Foundry. Before joining the ACLS staff in September 2021, she served as an ACLS Emerging Voices Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. There, she contributed to a variety of doctoral career diversity initiatives, as well as received training in digital humanities for her research on the history of the global Black press. As a historian of the African Diaspora with a specialization in modern Latin America, her research interests include liberalism, state formation, race, gender and sexuality, and black intellectual traditions. She received her PhD in history from NYU in May 2020 and her BA in Hispanic studies from Columbia University in 2014. In addition to her scholarly work, Keyanah has written extensively on race, gender, sexuality, and contemporary pop culture for public audiences, contributing to the academic blog Black Perspectives as well as serving as senior editor for Honeysuckle Magazine, an independent NYC-based arts and culture publication. She also serves as a research consultant for the podcast Multiamory, which explores non-normative relationship orientations from an intersectional perspective.