Leadership:
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Maryemma Graham
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. -
Ayesha Hardison
Ayesha Hardison is the Susan D. Gubar chair and an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Indiana University, Bloomington. She explores questions of race, gender, genre, social politics, and historical memory in her research and teaching on African American literature and culture. Hardison is the author of Writing through Jane Crow: Race and Gender Politics in African American Literature (University of Virginia Press, 2014), winner of the Nancy Dasher Award and a Choice Outstanding Academic Title. Her current book project considers depictions of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements in novels, film, art, and material culture. Additionally, she is co-editor with Eve Dunbar of African American Literature in Transition: 1930-1940 (Cambridge University Press, 2022) and has published several book chapters as well as articles in African American Review and Meridians. She has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Black Metropolis Research Consortium, National Humanities Center Summer Residency Program, and the Ford Foundation. She is director of the History of Black Writing (HBW), a literary recovery and preservation digital humanities project, and co-editor of the multidisciplinary journal Women, Gender, and Families of Color. -
Marilyn Thomas-Houston
Marilyn Thomas-Houston, Co-PI and Project Director for African American Studies Publishing Without Walls 2 (AFRO PWW2) UIUC Mellon grant and Co-PI for “Building Literacy and Curating Knowledge in Digital Humanities” (BLACK DH) NEH KU Grant; is Associate Professor Emerita at the University of Florida. She is Co-founding Editor with Daryl Michael Scott of the born-digital peer-reviewed journal, Fire!!!: The Multimedia Journal of Black Studies, published by the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH) and formerly distributed by JSTOR. Her publications include, ‘Stony the Road’ to Change: Black Mississippians and the Culture of Social Relations published by Cambridge University Press, the edited volume, Homing Devices: The Poor as Targets of Public Housing Policy and Practice published by Lexington Books, and Sustaining Black Studies in the 21st Century, a special edition of the International Journal of Africana Studies published by the National Council for Black Studies (link to digital edition). She is a Fulbright Scholar who spent more than 10 years studying the descendants of Black Loyalists, Refugees from the War of 1812, and Jamaica Maroons in Nova Scotia, Canada, and produced a two-part series, From These Roots, on the lives of a Black basketweaving family in that province. Other digital work includes iBlack Studies, a multimodal project that introduces readers to the interdisciplinary/multidisciplinary field of Black Studies. It is an archival base for digitized materials and publications documenting the field and the Black experience.
Staff:
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Erin Murray
Erin Murray (She/Her) is a Ph.D. student in Counseling Psychology at KU. She is currently a member of the Black Book Interactive Project (BBIP) and coordinator for the BBIP Scholars Program Digital Publishing cohort. In her free time, Erin enjoys painting, playing basketball, taking long walks with her dog Atlas, and listening to spooky podcasts – she is a Halloween baby after all. -
Onat Kolcu
Onat Kolcu (He/Him) is a Political Science Ph.D. student at the University of Kansas. He has a B.A. from the Izmir University of Economics (Turkey) in International Relations and European Union. Also, he has an M.A. degree in Sustainable Energy from the same university. His research focuses on energy governance, terrorism, and Turkish politics. He likes to travel and learn about other cultures, especially their cuisines. Onat is currently a member of the Black Book Interactive Project (BBIP) at the University of Kansas. -
Sarah Arbuthnot Lendt
Sarah Arbuthnot Lendt (She/Her) is the Research Project and Program Coordinator for the Project on the History of Black Writing (HBW). Sarah earned her M.A. in English from the University of Kansas in 2007. In her nearly 20 years with HBW, she has coordinated a number of programs, including the NEH-funded Language Matters II: Reading and Teaching Toni Morrison (2005), Making the Wright Connection: Reading Native Son, Black Boy and Uncle Tom's Children (2010), Don't Deny My Voice: Reading and Teaching African American Poetry (2013), Black Poetry after the Black Arts Movement (2015), and Hurston on the Horizon: Past, Present, and Future (2021), as well the ACLS-funded Black Book Interactive Project (BBIP) Scholar Program. In her spare time, she enjoys reading, cooking, traveling and spending time with her family. She and her husband have two children.
Former Staff:
Afro PWW Leadership:
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Ronald William Bailey
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Marilyn Thomas-Houston
Marilyn Thomas-Houston, Co-PI and Project Director for African American Studies Publishing Without Walls 2 (AFRO PWW2) UIUC Mellon grant and Co-PI for “Building Literacy and Curating Knowledge in Digital Humanities” (BLACK DH) NEH KU Grant; is Associate Professor Emerita at the University of Florida. She is Co-founding Editor with Daryl Michael Scott of the born-digital peer-reviewed journal, Fire!!!: The Multimedia Journal of Black Studies, published by the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH) and formerly distributed by JSTOR. Her publications include, ‘Stony the Road’ to Change: Black Mississippians and the Culture of Social Relations published by Cambridge University Press, the edited volume, Homing Devices: The Poor as Targets of Public Housing Policy and Practice published by Lexington Books, and Sustaining Black Studies in the 21st Century, a special edition of the International Journal of Africana Studies published by the National Council for Black Studies (link to digital edition). She is a Fulbright Scholar who spent more than 10 years studying the descendants of Black Loyalists, Refugees from the War of 1812, and Jamaica Maroons in Nova Scotia, Canada, and produced a two-part series, From These Roots, on the lives of a Black basketweaving family in that province. Other digital work includes iBlack Studies, a multimodal project that introduces readers to the interdisciplinary/multidisciplinary field of Black Studies. It is an archival base for digitized materials and publications documenting the field and the Black experience.
Afro PWW Staff:
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Charlotte Russell Cox
Dr. Charlotte Russell Cox is an Instructional Designer in the Office of e-Learning at North Carolina Central University where she provides support to faculty to create innovative online learning experiences. Dr. Russell Cox previously served as the Instructional Technology Specialist for Academic Computing Services at Technology Campbell University where she assisted faculty members with integrating technology into their courses. Prior to her work in higher education, she was a Technology Teacher and Instructional Technology Specialist/Webmaster in a K-12 school system. Her research interest has a focus on adult learning, online education, professional development, instructional design, MOOCs, and communities of practice. Dr. Russell Cox has fifteen years of experience in the educational technology field. She holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Education/Political Science from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, a Master of Science in Instructional Technology from North Carolina A&T State University, and an E-Learning graduate certificate from North Carolina State University. She earned her doctoral degree in the Adult and Community College Education program at North Carolina State University. -
Mary Borgo Ton
As a scholar of nineteenth-century visual culture and global history, I am particularly excited to support Black Studies projects that incorporate multimedia and intertextual sources. My enthusiasm for digital publication platforms like Scalar stem for their ability to offer interactive reading experiences. Designing a digital born dissertation transformed my writing process, teaching me how to pivot to multiple audiences and modes of scholarly communication. These experiences have made me eager to help authors adapt their own writing processes to digital publishing workflows. Whether it’s brainstorming how to make multiple paths through your material or making the transition to digital publishing as smooth as possible, I’m delighted to support you at any stage of the publication process. Before joining the IOPN team, I earned my Ph.D. in British Literature with a concentration in Victorian literature and a Graduate Certificate in Digital Arts and Humanities from Indiana University. My background in teaching professional writing and composition has given me a pragmatic approach to writing. Contributing to multimodal digital collections of materials from the global south, including Livingstone Online, One More Voice, and Archivo Mesoamericano, has helped me to synthesize humanities-based interpretive practices with technical expertise. As a CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow for Latin America and Caribbean Studies and as the Digital Pedagogy Specialist for the Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities at Indiana University, I have honed my pedagogy skills by leading numerous workshops on multimedia writing and digital approaches to global history. In my current position, I support authors and editors in all stages of the publication process as they create long-form digital scholarly works in Pressbooks, Omeka, and Scalar for the Illinois Open Publishing Network. -
Dan Tracy
As a member of the AFRO PWW 2 Tech Team and in my role directing the Illinois Open Publishing Network (IOPN), I look forward to teaching digital publishing concepts to participants in the Institute and working with authors and editors seeking to publish their projects through the AFRO-PWW series at IOPN. My research, across different disciplines, has engaged with design for imagined and real audiences in both print and digital contexts. My dissertation work and related publications examined how United States mass magazines in the early twentieth century imagined their audiences and created ideas about experimental modernism on a large scale. In my work in the library, I focus more specifically on user experience of digital publications and digital publishing platforms. How do digital publications impact the ways users read and absorb academic and literary writing, and what are the implications for thinking about audience when creating a digital publication—especially if it departs from the design of traditional books or articles? How can we make digital publishing platforms easy to use and create for those audiences? At the University of Illinois Library, I am an Associate Professor and Head, Scholarly Communication and Publishing. Before my work in the library, I received a PhD in English and MS in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois. At IOPN I help develop strategic partnerships, publishing policy, and manage our relationships with journals, as well as participating in outreach, education, and consultation work with authors and editors. -
Alex Dryden
In my role as the visiting research programmer for IOPN, much of my work takes place behind the scenes, where I manage the technical infrastructure that supports the IOPN publication platforms. So, as a member of the AFRO PWW 2 Tech Team, I am looking forward to helping scholars learn how to use our publishing systems. Before joining the IOPN team, I earned a Master of Science in Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, studying digital librarianship, web design, and data analytics. My research interests include using automated text analysis methods to better understand and manage collections. I also hold an MFA in Poetry from The New School, which I used to teach literature and creative writing in New York City before joining IOPN. My literature interests focused on collage, recombination and erasure, and I appreciate the ways that digital publishing allows authors and readers to rethink how they engage with texts. I am excited to explore with authors the many new ways we can leverage digital publishing and open access publishing to meet their professional and research goals. In the Institute, I can help you better understand the functions and capabilities of our publishing systems, learn and implement various web technologies, and troubleshoot any technical issues you encounter.