Black Book Interactive Project

Maryemma Graham is University Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at the University of Kansas. In 1983 she founded the Project on the History of Black Writing, which has been at the University of Kansas since 1999. With 10 published books, including The Cambridge History of African American Literature with Jerry W. Ward, Jr. (2011), The Cambridge Companion to the African American Novel (2004), Fields Watered with Blood: Critical Essays on Margaret Walker (2002), Teaching African American Literature: Theory and Practice (1998), and The Complete Poems of Frances E.W. Harper (1988) and more than 100 essays, book chapters, and creative works, she will publish with support from the Hall Center for the Humanities the translingual volume Toni Morrison: Au delà du visible ordinaire/Beyond the Visible and Ordinary with co-editors Andrée-Anne Kekeh (Université Paris 8) and Janis A. Mayes (Syracuse University) in 2014 and The House Where My Soul Lives: The Life of Margaret Walker in 2015. Her public humanities initiatives and international projects since her arrival at KU include The Langston Hughes National Poetry Project, 2002-2005, the Language Matters teaching initiative for the Toni Morrison Society 2003-2010, the Haiti Research Initiative 2011, and “Don’t Deny My Voice,” whose first summer institute on African American poetry was held in 2013. Graham has been a John Hope Franklin Fellow at the National Humanities Center, an American Council of Learned Societies Fellow, a Ford and Mellon Fellow and has received more than 15 grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities. In addition to African American literature and culture, Graham teaches course in genre studies (the novel and autobiography), Inter American Studies (transnationalism, the Global South) and is an active proponent of the digital humanities.

Jason Helms is an associate professor and director of the Center for Digital Expression at Texas Christian University. His scholarship explores how rhetoric and technology obscure their operations and effects through a myth of transparency. This focus emerged from distinct questions about the intersections of rhetoric and technology. Helms has experimented with scholarly modes, creating video games, animations, and comics, culminating in his digital monograph. He is also part of an interdisciplinary team at TCU building a research center around video games. They have received several internal grants, resulting in a regional symposium on diversity in games.

Jamila Moore Pewu is an assistant professor of Digital Humanities and New History Media at California State University, Fullerton. She leads the History department’s digital humanities initiatives, including organizing a regular DH colloquium series, hosting a DH student symposium, facilitating a six-week DH professional development workshop for master’s students, and teaching introductory and advanced practicum courses in Digital History. Additionally, she teaches survey and upper-division courses in U.S. History, African History, and Historical Research and Writing. Her work explores how and why groups and individuals reimagine spaces to create new urban futures, focusing on the unique historical, geographic, and methodological perspectives of African Diasporic and Black Atlantic communities.

Moya Bailey is an associate professor at Northwestern University in the Department of Communication Studies. Her work focuses on marginalized groups’ use of digital media to promote social justice, and she is interested in how race, gender, and sexuality are represented in media and medicine. She is the digital alchemist for the Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network and the Board President of Allied Media Projects, a Detroit-based movement media organization that supports an ever-growing network of activists and organizers. She is a co-author of #HashtagActivism: Networks of Race and Gender Justice (MIT Press, 2020) and is the author of Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance (New York University Press, 2021). She was an MLK Visiting Scholar at MIT for the 2020–2021 academic year.

Giselle Anatol is a Professor of English at the University of Kansas where her research focuses on Caribbean and Caribbean Diaspora Literature, especially 20th- and 21st-century women's writing, African American Literature, and Children's and Young Adult Literature, particularly representations of race and gender in narratives for young people. Her most recent book—The Things That Fly in the Night—explores representations of vampirism in African diasporic folk traditions and contemporary literature, especially the recent proliferation of narratives among writers of African descent (such as Edwidge Danticat, Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, David Chariandy, Toni Morrison, and others) who take up the monstrous character and reconfigure it to urge for female mobility, racial, cultural, and sexual empowerment, and/or anti-colonial resistance.

Paul Barrett is an associate professor at the University of Guelph in the School of English and Theatre Studies. With a background in computer science, Barrett focuses on digital humanities, exploring the intersection of Canadian literature, multiculturalism, and digital humanities. He is the author of Blackening Canada: Diaspora, Race, Multiculturalism (Toronto), the editor of 'Membering Austin Clarke (Wilfrid Laurier), and the co-editor of Future Horizons: Digital Humanities in Canada (Ottawa). His recent publications include "Fantasies of Recognition" in Topia and "Austin Clarke's Digital Crossings" in The Digital Black Atlantic. In the Fall of 2022, Barrett hosted the "Where From Here" Canadian literature conference at the University of Guelph. He is currently working on two books: The Routledge Guide to Canadian Literature and Digital Humanities, and The Map and the Territory: Canadian Literary Humanism, which examines the humanist foundations of Canadian literature from its inception to the present.

James Yeku is an assistant professor in the Department of African and African American Studies at the University of Kansas. He leads African digital humanities initiatives and collaborates with KU’s Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities and the Kansas African Studies Center. His research focuses on digital expressions of African and African diaspora literatures and cultures, emphasizing African digital cultural records. This digital focus also informs his creative writing, particularly poetry involving digital technologies. Additionally, his work explores cultural studies, social media in Africa, and online visual culture in Nigeria. He has published in journals such as Digital Studies/Le champ numérique, Social Dynamics, African Studies Review, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, and the Journal of the African Literature Association. His first monograph examines popular culture and new digital genres in social media activism, coining the term “cultural netizenship” to highlight the platformization of African cultural productions.

Dr. Jewon Woo teaches African American, American, and Women’s Literatures at Lorain County Community College, Ohio. Her essays appeared in American Periodicals, American Studies (South Korea), Research on Diversity in Youth Literature, J19: The Journal of Nineteenth Century Americanists, and the edited collection The Colored Conventions Movement (U of North Carolina P, 2021) and Teaching the History of the Book (U of Massachusetts P, 2023). She recently published a digital project about the Black press in 19th-century Ohio <OhioBlackPress.org> with the support of ACLS/Mellon and NEH, and in collaboration with George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media. She serves on various advisory boards related to public humanities, digital humanities, and historic newspapers. She is also a JT Mellon Satellite Partner at the Center for Black Digital Research at Penn State University in 2023-24.

Amanda Regan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Geography at Clemson University. She is a historian of the late-19th and 20th centuries and specializes in women and gender as well as digital history. She received her Ph.D. in 2019 from George Mason University where she was a Digital History Fellow at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM). From 2019-2021 she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Southern Methodist University’s Center for Presidential History. Currently she is working on two projects. First, she is the co-director of Mapping the Gay Guides an NEH funded digital history project that draws on Bob Damron’s Address Books – a prolific set of travel guides for gay Americans in the last three decades of the 20th century. Second, she is revising a book manuscript entitled Shaping Up: Physical Fitness Initiatives for Women, 1880-1965 which is under contract with the University of Virginia Press.

Tyechia Thompson is Assistant Professor of English at Virginia Tech whose areas of research include African American literature, digital humanities, and manuscript and archival studies. She is the creator of “Baldwin’s Paris,” a geospatial literary tool that maps over 100 references that James Baldwin made to places in Paris. She is the instructor and executive producer of the mobile application “Hip Hop Lit” in the Apple App Store. She is the recipient of an NEH-Mellon Fellowship for Digital Publication supporting the project “Place, Memory, Poetry, and the James A. Emanuel Papers at the Library of Congress.” She co-creator and co-host of the podcast The Inside Story, funded by an American Council of Learned Societies Digital Justice Seed Grant for the project “Building an Institute for Empathic Immersive Narrative.” She has published in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Afro-Publishing Without Walls/IOPN, Fire!!!: The Multimedia Journal of Black Studies, and the College Language Association Journal.

Dr Heather Froehlich is the Digital Scholarship Specialist at the University of Arizona Libraries in Tucson, Arizona, where she supports digital activities including text and data mining. She was awarded her PhD and MRes from the University of Strathclyde (Glasgow, UK), where she studied language, variation, and change through the representations of social identity in Shakespeare and other Early Modern London plays; before that, she studied English and Linguistics at the University of New Hampshire (Durham, NH, USA).Heather is especially interested in ways one can use off-the-shelf software and platforms as a route into text analysis and other digital methods. She enjoys collaborating across the disciplines though her training is primarily in corpus stylistics, historical sociolinguistics, literary linguistics, and digital humanities.

Schuyler Esprit is the Founder and Director of Create Caribbean Research Institute, the first digital humanities center in the Caribbean. Her research areas of interest include Caribbean literary and cultural studies, environmental and ecological humanities, and digital humanities. In addition to her writing for several magazines, journals and newspapers on topics related to Caribbean studies, Dr. Esprit writes and publishes on Caribbean literature, including on the impact of reading in communities in real and virtual spaces. Dr. Esprit also teaches at The University of the West Indies and has worked at The UWI, Dominica State College and other institutions in the United States in various roles of teaching and administration. Her book Imprinted: The Social History of Caribbean Reading is forthcoming with Papillote Press.