Second year Ph.D. student Lucas Avelar has been selected as a Mellon Data Fellow for the Freedom on the Move project. As a Fellow, Avelar will spend eight weeks this summer in residence at Cornell University and the experience will count as his internship for the Ph.D. program.
The Freedom on the Move project compiles stories of resistance from fugitive slave ads in newspapers. Through their online database and extensive metadata, the project’s represents “a detailed, concise, and rare source of information about the experiences of enslaved people.”
As a data fellow, Avelar will work with digital humanists and scholars of slavery, resistance, marronage, and emancipation to help deepen Freedom on the Move dataset. He will also work with a faculty mentor to develop a research paper related to the project.
