Digital Humanities Summer Fellowships

scholars in the fellowship program having a lively discussion at the conference table

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.

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Cohort Archives

2024 - 2025 Digital Humanities Summer Fellows

Oya Rose Aktaş
Doctoral Candidate
History
Jesse Cavalari
Doctoral Candidate
History
Heekyoung Cho looks to the left while wearing glasses.
Associate Professor
Asian Languages & Literature
Amelia Lehosit
Doctoral Candidate
English
LaShawnDa Pittman
Associate Professor
American Ethnic Studies
Anna Preus stands outside wearing a dark jacket and striped shirt.
Assistant Professor
English
Adair Rounthwaite sits on a blue chair wearing a pink sweater.
Associate Professor and Chair
Art History
Diana Flores Ruíz
Assistant Professor
Cinema & Media Studies
Jingrui Yan
Graduate Student
Cinema & Media Studies

2023 - 2024 Digital Humanities Summer Fellow

Mal Ahern looks at a roll of film that has been unwound.

Mal Ahern (she/her/hers)

Assistant Professor

Factory Forms: Making Copies in the Age of Automation

In the 1950s and 1960s United States, media executives attempted to use new computation technologies and cybernetic theories of control to automate the craft practices that had enabled image reproduction for the previous century. As printers, projectionists, and other technicians went on strike across the nation, misprints and distortions revealed the image’s formal infrastructure in disjointed layers, swarms of dots, and hallucinogenic flicker. Factory Forms archives and analyzes these visual traces of industrial automation and charts how aesthetic values changed in response to this crisis.