Recovery and Community: Multiethnic Digital Humanities in 2022

Jessica Marie Johnson is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at the Johns Hopkins University and a fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Studies at Harvard University. Johnson is a historian of Atlantic slavery and the Atlantic African diaspora. She is the author of Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World (University of Pennsylvania Press, August 2020), winner of the 2021 Lora Romero First Book Publication Prize of the American Studies Association, the 2021 Wesley-Logan Prize form the American Historical Association, the 2020 Kemper and Leila Williams Prize for Louisiana History, the 2020 Rebel Women Lit Caribbean Readers' Award for Best Non-Fiction Book, an Honorable Mention for the 2021 Pauli Murray Book Award from the African American Intellectual History Society, and a finalist for the Frederick Douglass Book Prize from the Gilder-Lehrman Institute. Johnson is an internationally recognized digital humanist. Johnson is the Director of LifexCode: Digital Humanities Against Enclosure and Senior Research Associate with the Center for the Digital Humanities at Johns Hopkins University. Alongside Drs. Yomaira C. Figueroa and Tao Leigh Goffe, Johnson also co-organizes the Diaspora Solidarities Lab, a Mellon-funded multi-university initiative applying Black feminist methodologies to collaborative scholarship. Johnson's essay, "Markup Bodies: Black [Life] Studies and Slavery [Death] Studies at the Digital Crossroads" is widely recognized as a ground-breaking intervention in the fields of Black studies, digital humanities and data science. Johnson is co-editor with Lauren Tilton and David Mimno of Debates in the Digital Humanities: Computational Humanities. She is guest editor of Slavery in the Machine, a special issue of archipelagos journal (2019) and co-editor with Dr. Mark Anthony Neal (Duke University) of Black Code: A Special Issue of the Black Scholar (2017). Her work has appeared in Slavery & Abolition,The Black Scholar, Meridians: Feminism, Race and Transnationalism, American Quarterly, Social Text, The Journal of African American History, the William & Mary Quarterly, Debates in the Digital Humanities, Forum Journal, Bitch Magazine, Black Perspectives (AAIHS), Somatosphere and Post-Colonial Digital Humanities (DHPoco) and her book chapters have appeared in multiple edited collections.

Roopika Risam is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies and of Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College, where she is part of the Digital Humanities and Social Engagement Cluster. Formerly, Risam was Chair of Secondary and Higher Education and Associate Professor of Education and English at Salem State University. She is the author of New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy (Northwestern University Press, 2018) and co-editor of The Digital Black Atlantic (University of Minnesota Press, 2021). Risam also co-edits the journal Reviews in Digital Humanities, which offers peer review of digital scholarly outputs. Risam is the Principal Investigator of the Digital Ethnic Futures Consortium, an initiative supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to build capacity for teaching at the intersections of digital humanities and ethnic studies. Her current book project, “Insurgent Academics: A Radical Account of Public Humanities,” traces a new history of public humanities through the emergence of ethnic studies.

Bob Morrissey is a historian of early American and environmental history at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign with deep interest in multiethnic digital humanities, particularly in his writing about Indigenous and French settler communities of the pre-modern midwest. Across several projects-- from network analysis of 18th century interracial kinship patterns to collaborative work on art and history among Peoria and Miami communities— he uses DH methods in part to unlock Indigenous stories in colonial archives. His recent works include a new book “People of the Ecotone: Environment and Indigenous Power at the Center of Early America,” soon to be out from University of Washington Press.

Rebecca S. Wingo is a scholar of the Indigenous and American West, and the Director of Public History at the University of Cincinnati. Wingo’s current manuscript, Framed: Housing and Photography on the Crow Reservation, argues that federal housing policy was designed to restructure the relationships the Crows had to the house, to the land, and to each other. In conjunction with the manuscript, Wingo is working on a digital repatriation project in consultation with Crow tribal members. Along with Jason Heppler and Paul Schadewald, Wingo edited an open-access volume called Digital Community Engagement exploring model practices and ethical challenges of academic and community partnerships. Their volume won the 2021 Book Award from the National Council on Public History. Wingo is also the co-author of an award-winning book, Homesteading the Plains: Towards a New History. Wingo earned her MA in Native American Studies from Montana State University and her PhD in History from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.