About Dr. Kenton Rambsy
Kenton is currently a professor of African American literature and digital humanities at the University of Texas at Arlington where his cutting-edges teaching includes a course titled “#theJayZclass”. This digital humanities course positions the prolific rapper in a broader literary continuum of autobiographical and semi-autobiographical works.
Kenton attended Morehouse College for his undergraduate studies and received his Bachelor’s degree in 2010, graduating Magna Cum-Laude and Phi Beta Kappa. Five years after his college graduation, Kenton received a PhD in English from the University of Kansas.
As an undergraduate and graduate student, Kenton organized digital archives while serving as a research assistant at both Vanderbilt University's Bishop Joseph Johnson Black Cultural Center in Nashville, Tennessee and Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History in Atlanta, Georgia. In 2009, Kenton, as the received a Schomburg-Mellon Humanities Fellowship and spent the summer living and working in Harlem. While studying at the University of Kansas, Kenton served as the digital initiative coordinator for the Project on the History of Black Writing (HBW). In this position, Kenton founded the African American literary blog and oversaw digital projects which explored the HBW’s robust collection of over 1,000 Black novels.
Kenton’s track record shows his commitment to pioneering digital-based research. Therefore, his ongoing work ensures that data analytics, text-mining, and mapping software are not just short-term trends, but instead, long-term components in the literary and Black Studies courses.
