Reflecting on my time in WGSS at Yale, 2017-2018

Angel David Nieves, Ph.D., Presidential Visiting Associate Professor, WGSS

We got “the call” from WGSS’s Laura Wexler whom I had gotten to know back in June, 2016 at the University of Victoria where we were in a class together at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute there. Laura asked, just over a year ago now, if I might be interested in getting onboard at Yale with a Presidential Visiting Professorship.  My husband, Richard Foote, Yale College ’78 quickly told me you just don’t say no to Yale. The move here has enabled huge changes in our personal and professional lives, downsizing from a house in upstate NY (in Seneca Falls, the home of women’s rights) that witnessed two decades of our lives as a couple together, to an apartment here in town after nine years at Hamilton College where I had been an associate professor of American Studies and Co-director of the Digital Humanities Initiative (DHi). We’re now much better prepared for yet another move this upcoming summer when we head to southern California where I will become a tenured faculty member at San Diego State University.

The year is proving to be a welcome opportunity to tackle a backlog of both analog and digital projects that have been underway for a number of years, and I’ve been able to bring a few projects to Yale and the DHLab at Sterling Library. For example, my first single authored manuscript, An Architecture of Education: African American Women Design the New South (2018) is forthcoming this June. I’m busy working on a special issue of American Quarterly with five other co-editors that looks at the intersection of American Studies and digital humanities. I am also co-editor on a new volume in the Debates in the Digital Humanities book series with two colleagues. Time here also allowed me to work on a National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation proposal, “Scholarship in 3D: A Proposal for a Digital Edition Publishing Cooperative” – something that I am overjoyed to report was awarded a $100K grant in early December and is now underway with fifteen project partners representing a whole host of institutions including UCSC, UCLA, USC, UMass-Amherst, UT-Austin, the Claremont Colleges, Maynooth University, the American Historical Association, Stanford University Press, the University of Georgia Press, Hamilton College, and the Cotsen Institute. We just wrapped up our first of two principals’ meetings for the year in late February.

I’ve already had the good fortune of teaching in my fall semester here an “Introduction to Digital Humanities” course along with Laura Wexler. After almost twenty-years of teaching, I can say that Laura is one of the most generous and empowering colleagues with whom one can ever hope to co-teach. It has also been rewarding working with students from across a variety of disciplines, departments, and schools including computer science, Latin American studies, pre-med, math, and a whole host of other interdisciplinary programs. Together in our course we used ESRI’s Story Maps platform to look at history of New Haven’s Black Panthers, the history of co-education at Yale, and some of the most recent controversy over the renaming of Calhoun College. Working closely with personnel at the DHlab housed in Sterling Memorial Library and with jub sankofa (our DH Fellow) was equally rewarding, as all shared their unique approaches to digital scholarship. This spring, I taught a small, graduate student only seminar entitled “Spatial Humanities and Social Justice.” The class is highly iterative and experimental in its approach, something only made possible by the fabulous array of graduate students currently in the course. I am also fortunate again, this time to be working with DH Fellow, Joey Plaster (Ph.D. candidate in American Studies) who brings his own vast experience in community based oral history projects.