2023-2024 IDAH HASTAC Scholars

Samuel Chirtel

PhD Candidate, English

Samuel (goes by Sam) is a current PhD Candidate at Indiana University-Bloomington in English Literature, a temporarily lapsed science fiction writer, and a former biophyicist. His dissertation research focuses on the role of magic in Weird Fiction, particularly that influenced by H.P. Lovecraft. As part of this work, Sam utilizes computational text analysis methods such as topic modelling and document classification. Before coming to IU, Sam received a B.A. in Biophysics from The John Hopkins University and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from The University of Colorado Boulder.

Marcela de Oliveira e Silva Lemos

PhD Candidate, Spanish and Portuguese

Marcela Lemos is a Ph.D. candidate in Portuguese at Indiana University Bloomington. She is from Belo Horizonte, Brazil, where she got her M.A. and first Ph.D. in Literary Studies from the Federal University of Minas Gerais. Her research focuses on the roles of photography in 21st-century Brazilian, Argentine, and Argentine-Brazilian literary works addressing the legacy and ruins of Southern American military dictatorships (1960s-1990s). Her dissertation aims to contribute to reshaping the concept of postmemory within a Southern American context and rectifying the frequent omission of Brazil from discussions on authoritarianism and human rights violations in Latin America. Her HASTAC project is prototype a digital map identifying contested memory sites of human rights violations and resistance to authoritarianism in three Brazilian cities. As she teaches Portuguese at IU, other research interests include Luso-Afro-Brazilian language and cultures and second language pedagogies.

Matt Hermane

PhD Candidate, History

Matthew Hermane is a PhD candidate whose primary focus is early modern Middle Eastern history. He is particularly interested in exploring travel and travel writing as a route for promoting transregional and transcultural studies as alternatives to the area studies model. His HASTAC project is inspired by his dissertation, which focuses on contemporaneous instances of French and Persian travel writing on Southeast Asia in the late-seventeenth century. For this project, he is building a prototype early modern travel database and mapping tool that might help users identify parallel historical accounts of different regional and linguistic origins to demonstrate how digital methods might encourage transregional and transcultural studies.

Joe Larson

PhD Student, Spanish and Portuguese

Joseph Larson is a 2nd year PhD student in the Hispanic Linguistics Program at Indiana University. His research areas include computational linguistics, phonetics and syntax. His HASTAC project is developed from a pilot project in a syntax class he took. It involves looking at factivity, a semantic property of predicates, in Spanish predicates (more specifically, emote factives e.g. enojar(se) que, alegrar que, etc).

Mikaela Martinez Dettinger

M.A. Student in Jewish Studies

Mikaela Martinez Dettinger is from Norfolk, Virginia. She has spent the past three years conducting geoarchaeological research in Eastern Europe, is pursuing her Master’s degree in Jewish Studies and IU Bloomington. Her research interests include Holocaust Memory and Holocaust Geography.

Lydia Nixon

PhD Student, History

Lydia Nixon is a PhD student in the English department, where her research focuses on contemporary literature and environmental justice. Her dissertation explores emergent temporal and ontological orientations in contemporary ecopoetry, specifically in the context of the climate crisis. Lydia’s HASTAC project dovetails with the growing interest within ecocriticism in joining traditional literary analysis with empirical ecocriticism: her project will examine how people engage with contemporary ecopoetry on social media, with the hope of better understanding how ecopoetry can serve as a mediator for the incomprehensible scale of the climate crisis.

Uzoamaka Nwachukwu

PhD Student, History

John Stanko

PhD Student, Political Science

John C. Stanko is a doctoral student in the Department of Political Science. John’s broad research area is the use of non-coercive influence by authoritarian regimes to achieve foreign policy objectives. More specific interests include Russia-China geopolitical relations, international higher educational policies and cooperation within Eurasia, and the application of network analysis to understanding soft power resources. John earned a bachelor’s degree in political science from Texas Tech University and a master’s degree in Russian, East European, & Eurasian Studies from the University of Kansas. John has previously been a Monterey Summer Symposium on Russia (MSSR) Fellow and has also received FLAS funding for studying both the Chinese and Kazakh languages.

Damien Thomas

M.A./M.L.S. in Information and Library Science

Damien Thomas is a graduate student at Indiana University Bloomington, currently pursuing a dual master’s degree in information and library science, specializing in digital humanities. He previously attended IUB for his undergraduate degrees in computer science, specializing in artificial intelligence, and religious studies, specializing in Buddhism and Hinduism. His work has taken him from audio and video preservation, to music archival, to corporate archives, to software development for digital libraries, and finally to digital humanities scholarship and research. His HASTAC project will focus on the work of Victorian poet Algernon Charles Swinburne, specifically looking at how his writing was influenced by the works in his library that were gifted to him by his close friend and literary compatriot Walter Theodore Watts-Dunton.