Author: aeregan

Second year Ph.D. student Hallie Knipp has been accepted to attend Columbia University’s Archives as Data Workshop this June in New York City. An exclusive NEH funded institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities, Knipp will spend two weeks learning to organize and analyze large document collections for textual analysis and will participate in several seminars with scholars in the field. The institute is jointly hosted by Columbia’s History Lab and Columbia’s Library.

The “NEH-funded program will offer practical training for historians and archivists in processing and analyzing textual data… Participants in the Text-as-Data workshop, designed for historians, will learn how to organize and analyze large document collections and use new methods to formulate original arguments. All participants will come together in seminar-style discussions on the novel challenges posed by doing archival research in the age of “big data,” including issues related to community representation, protecting private information in online archives, and the professional and scholarly pitfalls in navigating this new terrain.”

As the summer approaches, many of the Digital History Ph.D. students are off to do exciting research thanks to Clemson University’s Humanities Hub! Below is a roundup of some of the exciting research students will be pursuing thanks to the Hub.

Addison Horton

Addison Horton’s project is entitled “‘Antebellum Affairs’ in the United States South.” During the summer she will travel to visit the State Archives in South Carolina, North Carolina, and Georgia to collect data, which she will then organize into dataset which she can analyze using digital methods. This is part of a larger project that will contribute to her dissertation.

Megha Khanna

Megha Khanna’s received funding to travel to India over the summer to conduct research for her project, “Shadows of the Raj” which investigates how British colonialism transformed the societal roles of courtesans in 1857 India.  These women, once respected for their artistic and cultural contributions, faced marginalization as British rule took hold.

Hallie Knipp

Hallie Knipp will travel to Berea, Kentucky to conduct research for her project entitled “Mountain Labors: Contraceptives and Eugenics in 1930s Appalachia.” The Humanities hub grant will fund research at Berea College where she will delve into the history of the Mountain Maternal Health League and then will fund the work to process this research into a workable digital database.

Lucas Avelar, a second year Ph.D. student in Digital History, will present his digital history project entitled “An Imagined Geography of Empire: Mining cultural representations of the American colonial state during the St. Louis 1904 World’s Fair” at the 2024 Digital Humanities Conference in Washington, DC. Avelar’s project uses named entity recognition and word vector analysis to assess how local newspapers produced their own discursive representations of the U.S. and the world in response to the ideologies of American colonialism and exceptionalism embedded on the grounds of the St Louis 1904 World’s Fair.

Avelar’s digital history project was first completed in the Ph.D. program’s Digital History Seminar – a research seminar that allows graduate students the opportunity to develop significant digital history projects based on primary source research.

The Digital Humanities conference, hosted by the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations, is one of the largest DH conferences in the field. Held once a year in the summer, this year’s host in George Mason University in Washington, D.C. It will be the the first time the conference has been held in the United States since 2013.

The Kentucky Historical Society has awarded Ph.D. student Hallie Knipp a Research Fellowship. The fellowship will support travel and residency at the KHS for a period of one week in Summer 2024. The fellowship will support initial research for Knipp’s dissertation prospectus, tentatively titled “Mountain Labors: Contraceptives and Eugenics in 1930s Appalachia.”

Knipp’s research is focused on the history of contraceptives and eugenics in Appalachian coal mining communities during the 1930s. Specifically, Knipp is interested in the experiences of women who were unwittingly used as test subjects in the complex efforts of contraceptive research. While histories of Puerto Rican, Black, and incarcerated women unknowingly used as test subjects have been documented, the contraceptives and eugenics practices tested on so-called “mountain women” has been woefully underrepresented in the historiographical record. This absence, Knipp explains, is not surprising, as both histories of women in coal mining communities and the contraceptive and eugenics movement in Appalachia have been largely ignored.

Roger Grant, Kathryn and Calhoun Lemon Professor of History, died on November 17, 2023. A native of Albia, Iowa, Roger graduated summa cum laude from Simpson College in Iowa in 1966, and went on to earn his Ph.D. from the University of Missouri only four years later. His first academic position was at the University of Akron before he moved to Clemson in 1996, where he served as chair of the Department of History for five years. One of the nation’s foremost railroad and transportation scholars, Roger was the author, co-author, or editor of a remarkable forty academic books, including most recently Sunset Cluster: A Shortline Railroad Saga (Indiana University Press). His book Railroads in the Midwest will be published posthumously, also by Indiana University Press. “Roger was one of the leading historians of American railroads with an amazing record of publications, but what his colleagues will remember is his kindness and generosity, especially to new faculty,” Stephanie Barczewski, Chair of the Department of History and Geography, said. “Beyond his academic accomplishments, Roger was instrumental in building community within the department and university. He will be greatly missed.”

Join us via Zoom for information sessions. To register, select a date below:

• Thursday, September 21, 6:00pm ET

• Saturday, October 21, 1:00pm ET

• Monday, November 20, 6:00pm ET
  

Faculty will be available to discuss:

• Admission requirements
• Funding/Assistantships
• Degree requirements
• Digital history curriculum
• Anything related to the program

Sign up for zoom sessions here!

Join the Department of History and Geography on April 6th at 6pm in Hardin Hall 100 as we welcome Dr. Jacqueline Beatty for the Dorothy Lambert Whisnant annual Women’s History Talk. Dr. Beatty will discuss her new book, In Dependence: Women and the Patriarchal State in Revolutionary America. Faculty, students, and alumni are welcome.