Consultants

BBIP Consultants are subject matter experts and/or digital humanities experts and advise BBIP Scholars on their projects.

Learn more about BBIP's outstanding Consultants that have helped our scholars accomplish publishing goals.

  • Glen Layne-Worthey

    Glen Layne-Worthey is Associate Director for Research Support Services in the HathiTrust Research Center, based in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign School of Information Sciences. Formerly, he was Digital Humanities Librarian at Stanford, 1997-2019, and was founding head of Stanford’s Center for Interdisciplinary Digital Research (CIDR). He’s held many roles in the international digital humanities community and is currently Chair of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO) Executive Board. His graduate work was in Russian children’s literature at the University of California, Berkeley.
  • Harold Torrence

    Dr. Harold Torrence is a professor in the UCLA Department of Linguistics, where he also received his Ph.D in 2005. His research focuses on the comparative syntax and morphology of African and Native American languages. He is currently Co-PI on two research projects. The first project, with Jason Kandybowicz (of the CUNY Graduate Center), titled “Training and Text Collection as a Vehicle for Recruiting and Retaining Endangered Language Fieldworkers”, involves training students to conduct fieldwork through hands-on, up-close work with native speakers of endangered and understudied languages spoken in Ghana. The second, with Ivano Caponigro (UCSD) and Roberto Zavala (CIESAS San Cristóbal), describes and documents the morpho-syntax and semantics of headless relative clauses in Mesoamerican languages. Some recent publications from Dr. Torrence include: African Linguistics on the Prairie: Selected Papers from the 45th Annual Conference on African Linguistics.. (with Philip Duncan, Jason Kandybowicz, Travis Major). Language Science Press. Africa’s Endangered Languages: Documentary and Theoretical Approaches. (with Jason Kandybowicz). Oxford University Press. “Africas-Endangered-Languages-An-Overview”. (with Jason Kandybowicz). Introductory chapter in Africa’s Endangered Languages: Documentary and Theoretical Approaches. Oxford University Press. “The-Role-of-Theory-in-Documentation: Intervention Effects and Missing Gaps in the Krachi Documentary Record” (with Jason Kandybowicz). In Africa’s Endangered Languages: Documentary and Theoretical Approaches. Oxford University Press.
  • Irma McClaurin

    Irma McClaurin (https://linktr.ee/dr.irma) is an activist anthropologist, the Culture and Education Editor for Insight News, a columnist, and occasional radio and television commentator and recently appeared in the PBS American Experience documentary “Zora Neale Hurston: Her Own Way.” She is the CEO and senior consultant for Irma McClaurin Solutions, a past president of Shaw University, and former Associate VP at the University of Minnesota and founding ED of UROC. Recognition includes 2023 Honorary Degree from Grinnell College, 2021 American Anthropological Association’s Engaged Anthropology Award, 2015 “Best in the Nation Columnist” by the Black Press of America, and 2002 “Outstanding Academic Title” for Black Feminist Anthropology: Theory, Politics, Praxis and Poetics. McClaurin is a digital author on Medium and for Ms. Magazine. Her collection, JustSpeak: Reflections on Race, Culture & Politics in America, is forthcoming in 2023, and she is working on a book length manuscript entitled “Lifting Zora Neale Hurston from the Shadows of Anthropology.”
  • Jessica Parr

    Jessica Parr (she/they) is a professor of the Practice in History at Northeastern University. They are a historian of the Early Modern Atlantic, specializing in race and memory long eighteenth century, as well as in digital humanities, and archival studies. They are the author of Inventing George Whitefield: Race, Revivalism, and the Making of a Religious Icon (U. Press of Mississippi). The book explores Whitefield’s development as a symbol shaped in the complexities of revivalism, the contest over religious toleration, and the conflicting roles of Christianity for enslaved people. Evangelical Christianity’s emphasis on “freedom in the eyes of God,” combined with the problems that the rhetoric of the Revolution posed for slavery, also suggested a path to political freedom. Dr. Parr received their M.A. and Ph.D. in History from the University of New Hampshire at Durham. They hold a B.A and M.A. in History as well as their M.S. in Archives Management from Simmons College.
  • Julian C. Chambliss

    Julian C. Chambliss is a Professor of English and the Val Berryman Curator of History at the MSU Museum at Michigan State University. In addition, he is the faculty lead for the Department of English Graphic Possibilities Research Workshop and a core participant in the MSU College of Arts & Letters’ Consortium for Critical Diversity in a Digital Age Research (CEDAR). His research interests focus on race, culture, and power in real and imagined spaces. His recent writing has appeared in Scholarly Editing, Genealogy, KULA: Knowledge Creation, Dissemination, and Preservation Studies, and The Conversation US. As an interdisciplinary teacher and scholar concerned with real and imagined spaces, Dr. Chambliss integrates a historical understanding into investigations of contemporary culture. His work is framed around a central question: What does it mean to be a scholar in the twentieth-first century? Informed by a community engagement framework that emphasizes the Classroom as Platform, Dr. Chambliss pursues a public humanity practice that supports student learning and community action.
  • Marta Caminero-Santangelo

    Marta Caminero-Santangelo is a University Distinguished Professor and Chair of the English Department at the University of Kansas. Her research and teaching focuses on 20th and 21st century U.S. Latino/a/x literary studies. Her books include Documenting the Undocumented: Latina/o Narrative and Social Justice in the Era of Operation Gatekeeper (2016), On Latinidad: US Latino Literature and the Construction of Ethnicity (2007), and The Madwoman Can’t Speak: Or Why Insanity Is Not Subver­sive (1998). She is the incoming editor of the journal Latino Studies and is currently working on a book about Latino/a/x literature of the Heartland. She earned a BA from Yale University and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Irvine. She is a child of Cuban immigrants.
  • Najarian R. Peters

    Najarian R. Peters joined the KU Law faculty in summer 2020. Peters teaches torts as well as two privacy courses she created: Privacy Law and The Practice of Privacy Law. Peters’ work and scholarship focuses on privacy policy, law, governance, and emerging technology. Peters is a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. Prior to joining the KU Law faculty, she was the Inaugural Faculty Fellow and Assistant Professor of Law at the Institute for Privacy Protection at Seton Hall Law School where she was the architect of its structure, operations and program portfolio. In 2020, Peters created PrivacyPraxis, an annual conference that brings together scholars, practitioners, and advocates from a cross-section of disciplines to discuss privacy law and policy. Peters’ scholarly articles have been published in the 5Rights Foundation/Digital Futures Commission, Michigan Journal of Race & Law, University of California Law Review, Washington & Lee Law Review, and Seton Hall Law Review. Peters has three books forthcoming. Her first monograph will be published by University of California Press, in January 2024 and is titled Marronage and Modernity: Privacy, Technology, and Black Liberation. Additionally, Peters is the author of a forthcoming treatise on Kansas Tort/Personal Injury Law with Lexis Nexis Publishing and is the co-author of a forthcoming case-book tentatively titled Race and Privacy with West Publishing. Peters was named a co-principal investigator in 2021 for the Stories For All grant funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The grant funds her first work in the digital humanities titled The Jurisprudence and Child Privacy Praxis of Black and Native Home Education. Peters earned her J.D. at Notre Dame Law School where she created and taught the seminar in the Center for Social Concerns, Environmental Human Rights in the Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and was the recipient of the Joseph Ciraolo Memorial Award and Africana Studies Book Award. She received her B.A. at Xavier University of Louisiana.
  • Nazera Sadiq Wright

    Dr. Nazera Sadiq Wright is Associate Professor of English and African American and Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky. She is the author of Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century (University of Illinois Press, 2016), which won the 2018 Children’s Literature Association’s Honor Book Award for Outstanding Book of Literary Criticism. Her Digital Humanities project, DIGITAL GI(RL)S: Mapping Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century documents the cultural activities of black girls living in Philadelphia in the nineteenth century. In 2019, she was elected to the American Antiquarian Society. Fellowships through the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Bibliographical Society of America funded archival research for her second book, Early African American Women Writers and Their Libraries. Research Project: "Early African American Women and their Libraries"
  • Randal Maurice Jelks

    Randal Maurice Jelks is Professor of African and African American Studies and American Studies. He is an award winning author and a documentary film producer. His books are African Americans in the Furniture City: The Struggle for Civil Rights Struggle in Grand Rapids, Benjamin Elijah Mays, Schoolmaster of the Movement: A Biography, Faith and Struggle in the Lives of Four African Americans: Ethel Waters, Mary Lou Williams, Eldridge Cleaver and Muhammad Ali and Letters to Martin: Meditations on Democracy in Black America. Jelks has recently contributed to a collection of essays titled 42 Today: Jack Robinson and His Legacy edited by Michael Long. His essays have appeared in the Boston Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Truthout as well as other national blogs, journals, magazine and newspapers.
  • Robert C. Schwaller

    Robert C. Schwaller is an Associate Professor of History and Director of Graduate Studies at the University of Kansas. His research focuses on the development of race in Latin America and the experiences of Africans, their descendants, and indigenous peoples. His current project, tentatively entitled Maroon Conquests, examines the earliest instances of marronage (slave flight) in Hispaniola, Panama, and Mexico. Professor Schwaller is currently on the executive committee of the Latin American Area Studies Program. In 2012, he was recognized by the Center for Teaching Excellence as a Celebration of Teaching Honoree. His courses focus on the history of Latin America, specifically the colonial period and issues of race.
  • Robert Warrior

    Robert Warrior is Hall Distinguished Professor of American Literature and Culture at KU, where he teaches in English and American Studies as well as at Haskell Indian National University in Lawrence. A member of the Osage Nation, his main areas of interest are Indigenous studies, Native American literary studies, and Indigenous social movements. Among his books are The People and the Word: Reading Native Nonfiction, Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee, Tribal Secrets: Recovering American Indian Intellectual Traditions, and American Indian Literary Nationalism.
  • Sandra G. Shannon

    Sandra G. Shannon, PhD, is professor emerita of African American literature in the Department of English at Howard University. She is widely acknowledged as a major scholar in the field of African American drama and the leading authority on playwright August Wilson. She is the author of the books The Dramatic Vision of August Wilson and August Wilson’s Fences: A Reference Guide, has written numerous essays and chapters on Wilson. She has also served as editor of the College Language Association Journal (CLAJ) and as editor of several essay collections, including Modern American Drama: Playwriting in the 1980s and August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle: Critical Perspectives on the Plays. She is currently Dean of the College of Fellows of American Theater, President of the August Wilson Society, Scholar-in-Residence at Pittsburgh, PA’s August Wilson African American Cultural Center, and a Scholar Coach for Howard University’s 2023 Junior Faculty Writing and Creative Works Summer Academy. In fall 2020, Dr. Shannon successfully applied for and received a generous grant on behalf of the August Wilson Society from the Billie Holiday Theatre sponsored Black Seed initiative to support a two-year project titled Centering and Celebrating Wilsonian Warriors. This project, now based at the University of Pittsburgh, will examine the roles played by an August Wilson-centered community of actors, designers, musicians, and directors in securing the playwright’s current national and international reputation as one of the greatest playwrights of our time. A sample of her scholarship can be found at https://works.bepress.com/sandra-shannon/
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