Welcome AADHum's Newest Scholars
The AADHum Scholars Program is a digital and experimental production fellowship that provides support to post-docs, faculty, artists, programmers, GLAM professionals, and independent scholars for the implementation of a #BlackDH project.
Cienna Benn ’s research explores the modern development of Black aesthetic theory and its disciplinary logics practiced by Black photographers and filmmakers during social movements and initiatives throughout the twentieth century. Her work utilizes the Unbroken Genealogy approach to explore the meaning-making practices of contemporary visual artists and activists along the lines of visuality, gender and sexuality, temporality, and the Black Radical Tradition. As a Mellon Mays and CAMRA Mellon Fellow, Cienna makes use of multimodal methods to fill apertures between the humanities and visual culture through the creation of visual and digital scholarship. She earned her Bachelor’s Degrees in Africana Studies and Sociology from Howard University and is currently a doctoral student at UC Irvine.
// Click here to learn more about Benn's exploration of memory, textiles, and physical computing, Archival Assemblages.
Roopika Risam is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies and of Comparative Literature and part of the Digital Humanities and Social Engagement Cluster at Dartmouth College. She is the author of New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy. Her most recent co-edited volume, The Digital Black Atlantic, with Kelly Baker Josephs, was published in the Debates in the Digital Humanities series at U. Minnesota Press in 2021. Along with Jennifer Guiliano, Risam is founding co-editor of Reviews in Digital Humanities, a journal offering peer review of digital scholarship. She is also director of the Digital Ethnic Futures Consortium, a Mellon Foundation-funded initiative supporting teaching and research at the intersection of ethnic studies and digital humanities. With Quinn Dombrowski, Risam is co-president of the Association for Computers and the Humanities.
// Click here to learn more about Risam's linked open data project, "Linking the Black Diaspora with Open Data to Visualize the Void."
keondra bills freemyn is a writer and archivist whose work centers digital archives, social movements, and Black cultural production. keondra is founder of the Black Women Writers Project, an independent digital initiative highlighting the legacies and archival collections of Black women and gender-expansive creatives. keondra is author of the poetry collection Things You Left Behind and is a contributor to the anthology Black Librarians in America: Reflections, Resistance, Reawakening. An alumna of Fordham University (BS), Columbia University (MPA), and University of Maryland (MLIS), keondra is an SAA Digital Archives Specialist and holds a Graduate Certificate in Museum Studies from Harvard University.
// Click here to learn more about freemyn's speculative and archival mapping project, "Mapping Black Literary DC."