Digital Humanities Summer Fellowships
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 Digital Humanities Summer Fellows
2023 - 2024 Digital Humanities Summer Fellow
Bettina Judd (she/her/hers)
Mitochondrial Eve
Mitochondrial Eve tracks the trajectory of Black women as an archetypal mother. Mitochondrial eve (Mt-MRCA), who biological anthropologists have imagined as a dark-skinned sub-Saharan woman, and the desire for her mapped on the bodies of Black women in the 20th and 21st centuries, is the protagonist of this project. Through tracing Black women and their relationship to motherhood, I also consider these questions about our mother’s disconnection from her children split at the rupture of the concept of the human. Through video, sonnets, prose poems, and lyric, Mitochondrial Eve takes up the emotive landscape of both possibility and loss.