Digital Humanities Summer Fellowships Cohort Archive
The Simpson Center offers annual summer fellowships for faculty and doctoral students to pursue research projects that use digital technologies in innovative and intensive ways and/or explore the historical, social, aesthetic, and cross-cultural implications of digital cultures. The program has three primary goals:
- To animate knowledge—using rich media, dynamic databases, and visualization tools
- To circulate knowledge—among diverse publics
- To understand digital culture—historically, theoretically, aesthetically, and generatively
UW faculty and doctoral candidates are eligible to apply either on an individual basis or in teams for Digital Humanities Summer Fellowships every fall. Where research in the humanities is often undertaken by a single scholar, this program enables faculty and graduate students to collaborate with each other as well as with designers, information technologists, and librarians. Applications from scholars using the open-source multimodal authoring and publishing platforms are particularly encouraged; the Simpson Center is an affiliate of the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture. Review additional eligibility and application information for faculty and graduate students.
Up to 8 scholars—4 faculty and 4 doctoral students—will be selected each year; they will be required to be in residence for 6-8 weeks during the summer and will meet weekly to share their research. In addition to summer salary, each will have a research budget that can be used for expenses such as hourly support and software.
The Simpson Center gratefully acknowledges the support of a National Endowment for the Humanities Challenge Grant and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation as well as many donors to the endowment which is underwriting these fellowships.
2024 - 2025 Summer Fellows
2023 - 2024 Summer Fellows
2022 - 2023 Summer Fellows
2021 - 2022 Summer Fellows
2020 - 2021 Summer Fellows
2019 - 2020 Summer Fellows
2018 - 2019 Summer Fellows
2017 - 2018 Summer Fellows
2016 - 2017 Summer Fellows
2015 - 2016 Summer Fellows
2014 - 2015 Summer Fellows
2017 - 2018 Digital Humanities Summer Fellow
Sarah Ross (she/her/hers)
The Poiesis of Image-Signs in Modernist Cinema
This project uses a new scholarly form of film criticism—the video essay—to visually connect the logic of collage, which became prevalent in the early 20th century avant-garde movements, to the “high modernist” filmmakers of 1960s and 1970s. Members across avante-garde movements such as Cubism, Dadaism, Futurism, and Surrealism proposed that their artist objectives were to “liberate men,” and this freedom could be attained primarily through a visual exchange whereby the work of art caused the viewer to see anew. This project examines in what way modernist cinema embodies and learns from this aesthetic legacy beyond its earlier incorporation into the work of directors and theorists of the 1920s and 30s.