DHi Support Structure
Angel David Nieves, Ph.D.
Co-Director, Digital Humanities Initiative
anieves@hamilton.edu, or 315.859.4125
Angel David Nieves is an associate professor and the Director of the American Studies Program. He taught in the School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at the University of Maryland, College Park, from 2003-2008. Nieves completed his doctoral work in architectural history and Africana Studies at Cornell University in 2001. His co-edited book, 'We Shall Independent Be:' African American Place-Making and the Struggle to Claim Space in the U.S. (2008), examines African American efforts to claim space in American society despite fierce resistance. Nieves has published essays in the Journal of Planning History; Places Journal: A Forum of Design for the Public Realm; International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics; Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies; and in several edited collections, most recently in Places of Pain and Shame: Dealing With Difficult Heritage (2009). In May of 2010 he received The John R. Hatch Class of 1925 Excellence in Teaching Award. He is also the Associate Editor, of Fire!!!: A Multimedia Journal of Black Studies, a new on-line only journal of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH). His digital research and scholarship have also been featured on MSNBC.com and in Newsweek. Nieves' scholarly work and community-based activism critically engages with issues of memory, heritage preservation, gender and nationalism at the intersections of race and the built environment in cities across the Global South from New Orleans to Johannesburg, South Africa.
Janet Thomas Simons, M.S.
Co-Director, Digital Humanities Initiative
jsimons@hamilton.edu, or 315.859.4424
Janet Thomas Simons is Associate Director of Instructional Technology at Hamilton College. Her responsibilities include oversight and direction of the daily activities of the DHi to develop a collaborative community in which creativity, technology, and innovation lead to new methods of research, learning, and publication. This includes strategic planning in the use of technology, collaboration on grant proposals and budgets, management and communication of DHi projects, and creation of direct connections between DHi projects and the curriculum. She is engaged in faculty outreach and development; course design; identification and research of technologies appropriate to research projects and learning goals; and coordination of academic support services to meet teaching, learning, and research needs.
Janet's most recent activities include research and development of sustainable digital scholarship infrastructure and models for support of digital humanities research projects at liberal arts institutions. She serves as an organizer for NITLE's Digital Scholarship Seminar Series; and advocates for the Information Service & Instructional Support (ISIS) Seminars and Drop-in Sessions hosted by Alex Wirth-Cauchon at Mt. Holyoke College. Janet has presented regionally and nationally on: learning design, collaboration, media scholarship, and models for digital scholarship including presentations at EDUCAUSE's national conference; NERCOMP's annual conference and SIG events; ELI's annual conference; and NITLE's annual IT Leaders and Summit conferences. Janet has co-authored articles in Academic Commons, the Journal of Political Science Education, and most recently in Educause Quarterly on the NITLE-funded Media Scholarship in the Liberal Arts project with Colgate and St. Lawrence Universities.
Janet holds an M.S. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Prior to coming to Hamilton College ten years ago, she taught undergraduate biology courses at the University of New Orleans.
Gregory Lord
Lead Designer & Software Engineer, Digital Humanities Initiative
glord@hamilton.edu, or 315.859.4840
Gregory Lord is DHi's Lead Designer and Software Engineer. Prior to his work at Hamilton and DHi, Greg earned over 5 years of design and programming experience in the digital humanities at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, where he served as Web Designer and Software Engineer, helping shape a great deal of MITH's public presence and software design since 2005. Currently Greg leads the creation of the varied web and graphic designs that represent DHi, and lends his skills as a web programmer to the design and implementation of its digital projects. He holds a BA in English from the University of Maryland, where he studied creative writing, focusing his design and programming background upon the study and creation of digital and interactive hypertext literature.
Faculty Fellows
Patricia O'Neill, Ph.D.
Professor of English, DHi Internal Advisory Chair
poneill@hamilton.edu, or 315.859.4424
Patricia O'Neill, a member of the department since 1986, teaches 19th century British literature and a college course, Art of Cinema. She received her Ph.D. from Northwestern University and is the author of Robert Browning and 20th Century Criticism (1995) and editor of Olive Schreiner's 1883 novel Story of an African Farm (2002). Her current work includes a biography of Amelia Edwards, Victorian traveler and Egyptologist, and essays on cinema and globalization.
Erol Balkan, Ph.D.
Professor of Economics, DHi External Advisory Council Chair
ebalkan@hamilton.edu
Erol Balkan earned a Ph.D. in economics from the State University of New York at Binghamton and joined the Hamilton faculty in 1987. His current research focuses on the formation of middle classes through education and financial liberalization in developing countries. Balkan has received several awards and grants for his work, including the International Development Research Center Grant in 1996 to study the effects of short term capital flows on the Turkish economy. He teaches economic development, international finance and political economy of the Middle East at Hamilton and has lectured as a visiting professor at Bilkent University in Ankara and Sabanci University in Istanbul, Turkey.
Balkan’s recent book on the formation of the Turkish middle class and education Reproducing Class: Education, Neoliberalism, and the Rise of the New Middle Class in Istanbul was published in January 2009 by Berghahn Books. He is currently working on a manuscript titled The Neoliberal Landscape and the Rise of Islamic Capital.
Kyoko Omori, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures (Japanese)
komori@hamilton.edu, or 315.859.4866
Kyoko Omori earned her doctorate from Ohio State University in 2003. Her research focuses on 20th-century literary and popular culture, with an emphasis on mass media. She is currently completing a book titled Detecting Modanizumu: New Youth Magazine, Tantei Shô setsu, and The Culture of Japanese Vernacular Modernism. In addition, her recently published articles and book chapters include "The Art of the Bluff: Youth Migrancy in the Pacific Rim, Interlingualism, and Japanese Vernacular Modernism" (2009), "Narrating the Detective: Nansensu, Benshi's Oral Performance, and the Absurdist Detective Fiction of Tokugawa Musei" (2009), "Rajio hôsô no sengo: 'Hanashi no izumi' to 'Nichiyô goraku-ban'" (The Allied Powers' Education and Censorship Strategies in Post-WWII Japan: Radio Broadcasting in the late 1940s: 2008), "'Finding Our Own English': Migrancy, Identity, and Language(s) in Itô Hiromi's Recent Prose" (2007). She has been awarded research grants from The Miller Center for Historical Studies and the McKeldin Library at the University of Maryland, as well as postdoctoral fellowships from SSRC/JSPS, the Japan Foundation, and the International Research Center for Japanese Studies. Omori was also trained in language pedagogy and is a recipient of the Hamako Ito Chaplin Award, a national award recognizing excellence in teaching Japanese.
Thomas Wilson, Ph.D.
Professor of History
twilson@hamilton.edu, or 315.859.4236
Thomas Wilson, who joined the Hamilton faculty in 1989, earned a master's and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He also studied in Taiwan, at the Inter-University Program for Chinese Language Studies (or Stanford Center), and in the graduate department of history at the National Taiwan University. He returned to Taiwan in 1984 on a Department of Education Fulbright-Hays scholarship to conduct research for his dissertation. Wilson has been a member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton NJ, and he has received a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship and Summer Stipend. He has written extensively on Confucian orthodoxy and is a board member of the Society for the Study of Chinese Religions. Wilson edited On Sacred Grounds: Culture, Society, Politics, and the Formation of the Cult of Confucius (Harvard, 2003), to which he also contributed two chapters and is currently co-authoring a cultural history of Confucius titled Confucius through the Ages, to be published by Random House.
Martine Guyot-Bender, Ph.D.
Professor of French
mguyotb@hamilton.edu, or 315.859.4287
Martine Guyot-Bender, who holds a doctorate from the University of Oregon (1991), specializes in 20th-century French Studies. She teaches contemporary France and all levels of language. She has directed the Hamilton College Junior Year in France five times, most recently in 2007-2008. Guyot-Bender is the author of Poétique et politique de l'ambiguité chez Patrick Modiano (1999), and the co-editor of Paradigms of Memory: The Occupation and Other Hi/stories in the Novels of Patrick Modiano (1998). Her recent publications include articles and book chapters on cultural stereotypes (Sites, Summer 2001); French popular fiction (French Popular Culture, 2003); and French cinema and media (Women in French, 2004; Sites, Fall 2005). She has also published articles on Belgian-born novelist Amélie Nothomb, and on Simone de Beauvoir's social novel 'Les belles images' in a special issue of Lendemains, dedicated to the 100th anniversary of de Beauvoir's birth (December 2008). In addition, Guyot-Bender has presented many conference papers and contributed encyclopedia entries on popular culture during the Nazi occupation in France. A co-editor of Women in French Newsletter and a Cornell University visiting regional scholar since 2003, she is currently conducting research on French militant documentary film.
Crystal Leigh Endsley, Ph.D.
Faculty Fellow
cendsley@hamilton.edu
Crystal Leigh EndsleyEndsley, is currently Visiting Assistant Professor in Africana Studies. Previously she was an Instructor in the Women's Studies Department at the Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania where she also served as Interim Assistant Director for the Paul Robeson Cultural Center. Endsley completed her graduate studies at Penn State's main campus where she earned a dual Ph.D. in Women's Studies and Curriculum & Instruction.
Her awards and honors include a Virginia Commission for the Arts Playwriting Grant in 2005, an honorable mention for the Lamar Kopp, J. Award for International Service in 2007, a James T. Sears Honorable Mention award for Outstanding Paper by the Curriculum and Pedagogy Council in 2008, and an Outstanding Graduate student Teaching Award from the Women's Studies Department at Penn State in 2008.
Endsley originally hails from Louisiana and Virginia Beach, Virginia and, in addition to her academic career, she is internationally recognized as a spoken word artist, activist, and actor, performing and presenting workshops and lectures both in the United States and abroad. Her performances and current research focus on issues of performance and identity and the ways they intersect with feminist pedagogy, race, and popular culture; Hip Hop and cultural production as activism; and the connections between academic/home communities, motherhood and knowledge production.
Networked Faculty Fellows
Marla Jaksch, Ph.D.
Networked Faculty Fellow
mljaksch@gmail.com
Dr. Marla L. Jaksch is an Assistant Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at The College of New Jersey. She received her Ph.D. in Women's Studies and Art Education from The Pennsylvania State University and comes to TCNJ from Hamilton College.
Her research interests include: transnational feminisms, gender and development, indigenous rights and grassroots organizing, art and microfinance schemes, visual culture, cultural tourism, feminist pedagogies, and global service-learning.
She has developed and led various global field study and service-learning programs to Tanzania for more than 5 years.
Jaksch, a 2009-2010 Fulbright Scholar in Tanzania, has published essays in several journals, most recently in AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples, as well as authored book chapters. Additionally she has presented at several international and national conferences, workshops, and community meetings.
Anne Kelly Knowles, Ph.D.
Networked Faculty Fellow
aknowles@middlebury.edu
Anne Kelly Knowles is Associate Professor of Geography at Middlebury College. She previously taught at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth; Wellesley College; and George Washington University. Her books include Calvinists Incorporated: Welsh Immigrants on Ohio’s Industrial Frontier (University of Chicago Press 1997), Placing History: How Maps, Spatial Data, and GIS Are Changing Historical Scholarship (ESRI Press 2008), and three other edited volumes on the use of GIS in historical research. Anne’s current book project, Mastering Iron: The Struggle to Modernize an American Industry 1800 – 1868 (under contract with University of Chicago Press), has been supported by fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and National Endowment for the Humanities. Her ongoing research with the Holocaust Historical GIS project is funded by the National Science Foundation.
Catherine Gunther Kodat, Ph.D.
Professor of English
ckodat@hamilton.edu, or 315.859.4341
Catherine Gunther Kodat came to Hamilton College in 1995 with a joint appointment in the English and Creative Writing Department and the American Studies program. Kodat began her undergraduate studies as a piano performance major at the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University; metro desk reporter and dance critic for The Baltimore Sun during the 1980s, she received her PhD in English literature from Boston University in 1994. Her research and teaching interests in 20th century U.S. literature and culture include African American literature, music, film, and dance. Her current work in postwar U.S. culture centers on the importance of dance, particularly the path-breaking choreography of Merce Cunningham, in the development of the New York School aesthetic of the 1950s and early 1960s. A Fulbright lecturer in American Studies at Eötvös Loránd Tudományegytem (ELTE, or Loránd Eötvös University) in Budapest, Kodat has been a research fellow at the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford and was an inaugural recipient of a Millicent C. McIntosh Flexible Fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.
Isabel Martinez, Ph.D.
Networked Faculty Fellow
imartinez@jjay.cuny.edu
Isabel Martinez is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Latin American and Latina/o Studies. Her teaching and research interests include transnationalism, Mexican youth immigration, Mexican borders, and the intersections of race, immigration and technology. Long involved with issues of educational attainment in Latina/o communities, her recently completed research examines the transnational familial, labor and educational experiences of unaccompanied Mexican immigrant youth in New York. Her article, “What’s Age Gotta Do With It? Understanding the Age-Identities and School-Going Practices of Mexican Immigrant Youth in New York City” was published in a special issue of The High School Journal focusing on Transnationalism, Latina/o Immigrants and Education, and has a forthcoming chapter on the US-Mexico border in Latinas/os and Criminal Justice: An Encyclopedia (Greenwood Press), scheduled for release in 2011. She is currently a Digital Humanities Initiative Fellow at Hamilton College, and has received fellowships and grants from the Consortium for Faculty Diversity, the Association of Black Sociologists, the Spencer Foundation, and the Society for the Study of Social Problems. She received her B.A. in Sociology from Rice University, her M.A. in Educational Policy, Practice and Foundation from the University of Colorado at Boulder and her Ph.D. in Sociology and Education from Columbia University.
DHi Collection Development Team
Peter MacDonald
Library Information Systems Specialist
pmacdona@hamilton.edu
Peter MacDonald has 25 years of experience working in academic libraries at The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Harvard Law School and currently at Hamilton College. At Harvard he developed the Web display mechanism for the Nuremberg Trials papers. He is currently the Library Information Systems Specialist at Hamilton College (Clinton, New York) where he manages the library's digital collections, which includes over 2,000 TEI-encoded pages of Civil War letters and 8,000 TEI-encoded pages of a 19th-Century Shaker journal. Peter is also a member of the “TAPAS: Publishing TEI Documents for Small Liberal Arts Colleges" which is a grant-funded project to develop an interactive interface for scholars who use or generate TEI-encoded documents in their research. His main roles in the DHi initiative will be to promote the use of TEI-encoding in scholarly activity on campus and consult on metadata issues.
Lisa McFall
Metadata and Catalog Librarian
lmcfall@hamilton.edu
Lisa McFall is the Metadata and Catalog Librarian at Hamilton College. Lisa provides the metadata for the Library's Digital Collections, as well as being responsible for the original cataloging of sound recordings and rare books.
In her role as a consultant to DHi, Lisa assists in developing metadata guidelines and best practices both broadly for DHi and at the individual project level. She also serves as an advisor to faculty and students who are creating metadata for projects.
Lisa holds the degrees of Bachelor of Music in Music Education from SUNY Fredonia, Master of Library and Information Science from the University of Pittsburgh and Master of Arts in Ethnomusicology, also from the University of Pittsburgh.
Steve Young
ITS, Network Services Unix/HPC System Administrator
slyoung@hamilton.edu
Steve Young is a Unix/HPC System Administrator within the ITS's Network Services Team at Hamilton College. His responsibilities are primarily managing the Unix based High Performance Computing (HPC) clusters for the College. Chemistry, Biology, Psychology, Economics, and Physics have active research programs requiring HPC resources at Hamilton. Steve has 20 years experience working with Unix based systems and open source software.
Steve is a member of Hamilton's Digital Humanities Initiative (DHi) Collection Development team. In this role, he builds and maintains the network infrastructure for DHi and also collaborates with software consultants to develop research services. Most recently, he has been working with Discovery Garden consultants to install and configure Fedora Commons and Islandora on DHi servers.
Before coming to Hamilton in 2004, Steve worked in the private sector at a web hosting solutions provider. He helped manage web and database servers for customers like John's Hopkins University, America's Job Bank (Dept. of Labor), Guggenheim Museum, NOAA, and Denver Bronco's to name a few. He holds an A.A.S. in Electrical Engineering Technology (SUNY Canton) and a BA in Computer Science (SUNY Oswego).
Student Fellows
Gabriela Arias
DHi Student Fellow
garias213@gmail.com
Gabriela Arias—Gabi for short—was born and raised in New York City; however, she has called Wallkill, NY home since 2001. As a member of the first generation of her family to be born in the United States, she is proud of her roots. She considers the African ancestry of Dominicans from across the diaspora central to her identity as a Dominican-American woman. The history and culture of Afro-Latinos fascinates her and is an academic interest which she has been fortunate enough to explore at Hamilton College. An Africana Studies major, Gabi is especially interested in the intersections between institutions of public history and the process of historical preservation in communities across the African diaspora. Throughout her college career, she researched the complex relationship between personal and family histories, particularly in marginalized communities, and their preservation in the archives. For the past two summers, Gabi held internships where she was engaged in digital archival work and humanities-based technology research. In 2009, she aided in building an online, interactive digital archive dedicated to the 1976 student protests in Soweto, South Africa. This summer, she delved into two exciting research based internships. First, at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies, Gabi processed and digitized their extensive collections on the LGBT Puerto Rican community in New York City. Second, she interned at El Museo del Barrio and aided in the development of their website and potential mobile application. An aspiring archivist, Gabi intends to begin graduate school in the fall of 2011 in a Library and Information Sciences program with an emphasis in cultural heritage archival preservation.
Alex Benkhart
DHi Student Fellow
abenkhar@hamilton.edu
Alex Benkhart is a senior Religious Studies/Asian Studies double major at Hamilton College. Alex makes an effort to incorporate digital media into every aspect of his study, having worked independently on examinations of religious visual culture, anime heroines, and the commodification of sex in contemporary Japanese art. Alex has been working closely with Professor Kyoko Omori over the past year to create the Comparative Japanese Film Archive. He says he finds this work very rewarding and hopes to continue with the project until its completion. Currently, Alex is applying for a Fulbright research grant that will take him to Japan in order to study depictions of homosexuality in Japanese popular culture. Alex’s dream is to ultimately make a documentary on the topic.
Mary Lehner
ITS, Rich Media Research and Development Intern
mlehner@hamilton.edu
Mary Lehner is a senior at Hamilton College concentrating in Environmental Studies, with minors in Physics and Math. Her interests are broad ranging and encompass digital and performance art in addition to science. Mary's background in web design, computer programming, graphic design and video led to the position she has held for the past two years as a Rich Media Research and Development Intern in ITS at Hamilton. In this role, she helps faculty and students in research and course projects incorporating multimedia for analysis and/or creative expression. In Hamilton's Digital Humanities Initiative (DHi), Mary's research interests and programming skills combine to assist on the DuraCloud pilot project. She works with ITS and the library in development and testing of cloud storage solutions for DHi faculty research collections. Mary plans to use the technical skills that she has learned while working at Hamilton College in the environmental research she will pursue post-graduation.
DHi CLASS Scholars
Sarah Bither
DHi CLASS Scholar
Sarah Bither is an Asian Studies major and an Economics and English double minor at Hamilton College. She enjoys studying the complexities of Japanese language and culture and is a self-proclaimed bookworm. Alongside Professor Kyoko Omori, Sarah is currently conducting a comprehensive study of the power and influence of Japanese silent film on the Japanese culture and film industry. Ultimately, she hopes to travel to Japan and continue her research by working closely with rare primary sources. As technology continues to rapidly evolve, Sarah will aim to take advantage of these new technological opportunities and incorporate digital media into her studies. She is confident that the research, analytical, and presentation tools she has developed through DHi will be a tremendous asset to her in whatever career path she pursues, whether it be in humanities or finance.
Xinyang Li
DHi CLASS Scholar
Xinyang Li is working on her project about Confucianism’s role in China. Confucianism has been a school of thought, which is considered as the orthodox thinking of Chinese culture. However, as China develops its economic power, Confucianism serves new roles. It has become a symbol of Chinese culture as Confucian Institutes are established vastly in the Western world. Furthermore, Confucianism has been commercialized in recent decades, serving to attract tourists. Li is exploring whether Confucianism is losing its essence while it is acting multiple roles or Confucianism coexists with its new roles.
Max Lopez
DHi CLASS Scholar
Max Lopez is a rising sophomore and archaeology major at Hamilton College. Having been interested in archaeology since a very young age, Max now works with Professor Nathan Goodale on a site in the Slocan Valley of British Columbia. The site consists of a series of pit houses or winter homes for the Native Americans that inhabited it. Max, who has been working with and learning 3D digital modeling software over the summer, will visit the site and using GPS/GIS technology will map the pit houses. After that he hopes to create an accurate to life 3D reconstruction of the site that can be walked through and interacted with. Not only will this reconstruction aid in research as a cost effective alternative to a physical reconstruction of the site but it will also be a new way to get the public involved in the research. Archaeology is a field defined by advancing technology and Max looks to use his knowledge of 3D modeling to continue pushing the field forward in new ways and staying ahead of the curve.
Ujjwal Pradhan
DHi CLASS Scholar
Ujjwal Pradhan is working on The Beloved Witness, a digital humanities project that aims to create a collaborative digital archive for the works of a Kashmiri American poet, Agha Shahid Ali. Shahid ia a famous Kashmiri-American poet who popularized ghazal form of poetry and represented the Kashmiri struggle in his poems. Ujjwal is working with Professor Patricia O’Neill in getting a deeper understanding of Shahid’s works as the archive is being built.
Ujjwal worked as a journalist for a national newspaper during his gap year in Nepal, and has keenly followed South Asian geo-politics. With the Witness project, he is attempting to use his knowledge to comprehend the Kashmiri struggle through Shahid’s poems. Besides creating an interactive archive interface for readers to learn about Shahid’s life and works, he is also very interested in using the new technology in analyzing literary texts like Shahid’s.
Randall Telfer
DHi CLASS Scholar
Randall Telfer is a rising senior at Hamilton College, majoring in both Chinese language and World Politics. He recently returned from a semester abroad at the Minzu University of China located in Beijing, where he studied advanced modern Chinese and Classical Chinese, and also conducted research on the environmental ethics of Confucian, Buddhist, and Daoist teachings. While in China, he also made his debut as an amateur Xiangsheng performer. Back in his hometown of Avon, CT, however, no one wants to see him on a stage of any kind. Telfer joins the Digital Humanities Initiative at Hamilton College with an interest in the Cult of Confucius as well as the relationship between Confucian teachings and the environment.
Brynna Tomassone
DHi CLASS Scholar
Brynna Tomassone is a member of the class of 2012, just having returned from her junior year abroad as part of the Hamilton College Academic Year in Spain program. Ms. Tomassone is double majoring in Hispanic Studies and Africana Studies, with a particular interest in the socio-politic-linguistic influence of the African diaspora on women in the Caribbean. Ms. Tomassone will deliver a paper entitled 'The Use of Study Abroad in the Development of a Global Multicultural Perspective for Preservice Teachers in both Kenya and the United States' at the International Conference on Education at Kenyatta University, Nairobi, Kenya, East Africa in July, 2011. Additionally, she is completing a Culture Liberal Arts and Society Scholar (CLASS) fellowship, working on a Digital Humanities project documenting the Soweto uprising in 1976. In collaboration with Dr. Angel Nieves and his work on the Soweto '76 Digital Archive, Ms. Tomassone is hoping to raise awareness to social justice issues by linking global perspectives and the human experience. Ms. Tomassone plans to pursue her scholarly interests in graduate school abroad.
Melissa Yang
DHi CLASS Scholar
Melissa Yang is a sophomore at Hamilton College. She is a DHi undergraduate scholar. She is currently working with Professor Kyoko Omori and Sarah Bither on the Comparative Japanese Film Archive, which was started by Professor Omori and Alex Benkhart. Her interest in films and filming techniques was cultivated during her time at Brooklyn Technical High School. At the same time, she picked up an array of skills in manipulative software, which she hopes to add to in the future. Melissa also has an interest in foreign languages. She hopes to study abroad in China and Japan during her junior year to further her language skills. She would like to work on future projects that would put her acquired language skills to use.