2020-2021 HASTAC Scholars

HANNAH ENSIGN-GEORGE

MLS Candidate, School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering

As a student in the MLS program, I am interested in not only what people are reading, but also what analysis of genre, subject, and authorship can convey. My proposed project involves creating a database of romance novels spanning the last 70 years or so as modern romance has developed into a genre and publishing juggernaut. Beyond their commercial success, romance novels play an important role in readers lives. I am interested in exploring that role and related issues of representation, cultural appropriation, and authorship among the body of novels I study. By looking at a sample of romance novels over a period of time, I hope to explore the development of the genre and track themes, subjects, and sub-genres as they evolved over that period.I will use DH techniques like TEI to encode the characteristics of each novel, avoiding encoding the complete novels due to copyright restrictions

TIM ETZKORN

Ph.D. Candidate, English

As a third-year Ph.D. student in the English department, my research focuses on foodways, digital humanities, and theories of relationality, particularly from a rhetorical studies perspective. My project, “Drinking, Communing, Relating,” will produce a video essay in which I survey a history of U.S. bar culture and how COVID-19 has changed the way we drink, eat, and connect. Questions at the center of this project are: how do we relate? How does food and drink bring people together? What similarities are there between the table and digital spaces? What is relationship and relationality anyways? By exploring how food, drink, and digital mediums can build (or divide) community, I hope to add to pedagogies informed by relationship and relationality while contributing to a growing body of multimodal scholarship.

MATT LANDINI

Undergraduate, Dual Major in History and Folklore

My name is Matt Landini and I am a senior with a dual-major in History and Folklore. Many of my interests academically try to find a crossroads between these two fields, mainly focusing on cultural diffusion, material culture, public history, and incorporating digital humanities into my research in some manner. My current project revolves around using network and text analysis to visualize connections between different variations of the Brothers Grimm Fairytales from the time they were collected by the Brothers Grimm in the 19th c. to when a mass immigration of Germans came to the North Carolina area in the early 20th c. through to tales that are told or seen today.

JOIE MEIER

Ph.D. Candidate

My name is Joie Meier and I am a third year PhD student. Through the HASTAC project, I hope to identify the similarities in rhetoric used by the Hungarian political group Mi Hazánk Mozgalom and the ethnonationalist organization known as the American Identity Movement, which is based in the United States. Through analyzing and identifying similarities in the language between these two organizations, I hope to understand how the language of ethnonationalism transforms as it crosses national boundaries and how each organization uses language differently to recruit members to their cause.

SEAN PURCELL

Ph.D. Candidate, Media School

My work challenges the discursive construction of the human body in medical contexts, with an emphasis on the ontological reliance on posthumous human material for curative knowledge claims. Running parallel to my research interests in American pathology at the turn of the twentieth century, this installation engages with the visual ephemera collected and displayed for medical argument and pedagogy. A found footage documentarian by training, I am turning toward site specific media installations to practice means of engaging publics with the routinely gruesome history of medicine. The prospective installation will use digital video projection within a gallery or museum space to reflect on found historical materials, acquired in archives, textbooks, and journal articles to critique the image of the human as it is found in medicine, and to reimagine how that image may be understood when integrated into an empathic, non-medical context.

DARYL SPURLOCK

Ph.D. Candidate, Spanish and Portuguese

My research centers on Latina/o/x literature and history, especially in the Spanish-language newspapers of nineteenth-century New Mexico. These broadsheets are littered with subtle information about subscribers' and contributors' lives and locales, many of which are hundreds of miles away from the printing presses in Santa Fe. My goal as part of the HASTAC program is to create a database in which I piece together geographic clues about these newsmakers and readers, uncovering the circulation paths of these papers across the United States and northern Mexico. Before coming to IU as a Ph.D. student in Hispanic Literatures, I lived, studied, and worked across Latin America. My dissertation project, at the nexus of print culture and citizenship, is informed not only by interdisciplinary academic training, but also by experience working as a Spanish/English tutor in local schools and as an advocate for people seeking asylum in the United States.

JAZMA SUTTON

Ph.D. Candidate, History

Jazma earned a B.A. in Africana Studies and History at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, a M.A. in U.S. History at Indiana University and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in U.S. History with a minor in Gender Studies at IUB. Her dissertation explores the origins and development of Indiana’s rural free black communities, gendered experiences of freedom, and free and self-liberated black women’s roles in the Underground Railroad, and the archive. Jazma recently led a CRRES and IDAH sponsored History Harvest involving descendants of the Greenville community she studies in Randolph County, Indiana and Darke County, Ohio and is working to transform their historical artifacts and oral histories into a digital archive.