Apr 4: Connect with Research

Co-sponsored with the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship
12 noon to 1:30
Jones Room, Robert W. Woodruff Library

The Center for Faculty Development and Excellence and the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship are partnering to present “Connect with Research,” a showcase of the creative use of digital tools happening in the humanities at Emory.

Three faculty presenters will talk for about 15 minutes each about their projects and learning with technology experiences. For the second portion of the program, each presenter will be stationed iMacs set up at different tables, and participants will be invited to visit each station for a more close-up, guided, interactive exploration of the projects.

All are invited to come learn and talk about ways that digital technology mingles with humanities research. Dessert and coffee will be served.

Presenters and Projects

Mary Frederickson is a Visiting Professor in the Rollins School of Public Health and Professor Emeritus in the Department of History at Miami University. Her research and teaching focus on gender, race, labor studies, and the social impact of disease. Her most recent books include Looking South: Race, Gender, and the Transformation of Labor (2011) and Gendered Resistance: Women, Slavery, and the Legacy of Margaret Garner (2013). Currently she is writing a global cultural history of sickle cell disease and is Series Editor of Public Health in the US and Global South for Southern Spaces.

“Narrating Sickle Cell: Medical Humanities in Genetic Medicine”

Explores the history, medical treatments, ethical concerns, politics, and global trajectories of this disease that affects millions of people worldwide.

The new website created as part of this project began the process of integrating clinical practice and medical humanities research in an interactive digital space. In conjunction with the ongoing work of physicians and scientists, considering the historical contexts, ethical boundaries, and artistic and literary representations of sickle cell expands the creativity, observation, and sensitivity of researchers on both sides of the academic divide and fosters what historian David Hollinger recently called “the deep kinship between humanistic scholarship and natural science.”

This work is a collaborative effort by the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship, the Aflac Cancer and Blood Disorders Center at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, the Rollins School of Public Health, the Emory School of Medicine, and the Comprehensive Sickle Cell Center at Grady Hospital. The website is widely used by patients, families, teachers, and healthcare providers throughout the United States and around the globe, often averaging 13,500 hits per month, and over 150,000 per year.

Yanna Yannakakis is Associate Professor in the History Department at Emory University. Her research focuses on the interaction of colonial Oaxaca’s indigenous communities with the Catholic Church and legal system.  She is the author of The Art of Being In-Between: Native Intermediaries, Indian Identity, and Local Rule in Colonial Oaxaca (Duke University Press, 2008), co-editor with Gabriela Ramos of Indigenous Intellectuals: Knowledge, Power, and Colonial Culture in Colonial Mexico and the Andes (Duke University Press, 2014), and most recently, co-author with Martina Schrader-Kniffki of “Between the ‘Old Law’ and the New: Christian Translation, Indian Jurisdiction, and Criminal Justice in Colonial Oaxaca” in Hispanic American Historical Review Special Issue “New Directions in Colonial Latin American History” 96:3 August 2016. She is currently working on a book project, “Mexico’s Babel: Native Justice in Oaxaca from Colony to Republic,” which has won the support of the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Simultaneously, with the support of a Mellon New Directions Fellowship, she is working on a digital humanities project “Power of Attorney in Oaxaca, Mexico: Native People, Legal Culture, and Social Networks in Mexico.”  Dr. Yannakakis is an active doctoral mentor, serves on multiple editorial boards, and is a member of the General Committee of the AHA-sponsored Conference on Latin American History.

“Power of Attorney in Oaxaca, Mexico: Native People, Legal Culture, and Social Networks”

“Power of Attorney,” an on-going digital research project, constructs a geography of legal culture through digital maps and visualizations that express social networks and flows of knowledge and power created by native people’s engagement with Mexico’s colonial and post-colonial legal system. Through analysis of relationships among people, places, and courts created by a common legal procedure – the granting of power of attorney – we contribute to a growing body of interdisciplinary scholarship that challenges the stubborn idea that native people were isolated from the law by geography, language, and cultural difference, and interacted with the law primarily as victims of state domination.

Sarah McKee is the senior associate director for publishing at the Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry. Prior to her arrival at Emory, she worked for fifteen years at the University of Georgia Press, serving most recently as managing editor of the New Georgia Encyclopedia, an open-access digital humanities reference work.

Digital Publishing in Humanities at Emory University

The Digital Publishing in Humanities initiative, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, aims to create an infrastructure that supports humanities faculty at Emory University in the publication of digital monographs that are peer reviewed and open access. By connecting faculty with editors at university presses, providing a subvention toward the costs of creating a digital work, and encouraging campus-wide conversations about digital publishing, we hope to discover new funding and production models that will ultimately lead to greater impact for humanities scholarship both within and beyond the academy.