Faculty & graduate students with an interest in the practice of digital history are invited to join Stephen Robertson for a conversation about his own research as a social historian of the U.S. and the ways in which his work as a scholar has been transformed through collaborations on digital projects such as Digital Harlem and in his new role as Director of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University.

When: Tuesday, November 19, 12pm-1pm

Where: Digital Innovation Lab, Greenlaw 431

RSVP: stephanie.barnwell@unc.edu (not required, but encouraged!)

Stephen Robertson is an internationally renowned social historian of the U.S. and leading practitioner of digital history, having spent the last thirteen years in the History Department and program in American Studies at the University of Sydney. Along with his collaborators (Shane White, Graham White, and Stephen Garton), he received the 2010 American Historical Association’s Rosenzweig Award for Innovation in Digital History and the ABC-CLIO Online History Award of the American Library Association for Digital Harlem, which uses public records to illuminate everyday life in Harlem in the 1920s. He is also the author of Crimes against Children: Sexual Violence and Legal Culture in New York City, 1880-1960 (University of North Carolina Press, 2005) and co-author of Playing the Numbers: Gambling in Harlem Between the Wars (Harvard University Press, 2010).

Robertson is the newly appointed Director of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. Since 1994, the Rosenzweig Center has pioneered the use of “digital media and technology to preserve and present history online, transform scholarship across the humanities, and advance historical education and understanding.”  Its project websites (including those for the DH tools Omeka and Zotero) receive over 20 million visitors annually.  It has received grants/awards from National Endowment for the Humanities, the U.S. Department of Education, the Library of Congress, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Mellon, Sloan, Hewlett, Rockefeller, Gould, Delmas, and Kellogg foundations.