As part of the Carolina Digital Humanities Initiative, the Digital Innovation Lab will co-host four two-year postdoctoral fellows. In addition to teaching digital humanities classes in their home departments and developing their own DH projects, the fellows will also contribute to ongoing project work in the DIL.

Current Postdoctoral Fellows

Julie Davis, Digital Innovation Lab (2014-2016)

Raised in a small town in the Minnesota northwoods, Julie Davis earned her Ph.D at Arizona State University in 2004. Her book on the AIM survival schools reveals the history of Indian education, community activism, cultural revitalization, and Indigenous decolonization in Minneapolis/St. Paul since 1968. As a public historian and oral historian, she engages how people understand and make meaning from the past, and she works to both analyze and influence how local communities represent their history. Her current research explores the public reinterpretation of the past in post-conflict Belfast. She’s interested in how “re-storied” historical narratives might foster reimagined identities in societies shaped by transnational processes of settler colonialism. Her experience in oral history, historic site interpretation, and exhibit development includes work at the Mill City Museum in Minneapolis. She sees in the digital humanities powerful tools for public interpretation and community engagement, as well as creative methods for visualizing historical processes and teaching historical thinking. Julie joined the Digital Innovation Lab in September 2014 as Project Director for the Loray Mill Project. While directing ongoing Digital Loray initiatives, Julie also is leading the creation of a history center at the repurposed Loray Mill. In collaboration with community members and cultural heritage organizations, she is developing exhibits and public programs to engage people with the history of the mill and the lives of those who worked there.

Marie Saldaña, History Department (2015-2016)

Marie Saldaña is interested in the interface of the natural and artificial at the intersection of landscape, technology, and architecture. As a digital humanist, her work engages new media techniques of 3D visualization and mapping, with emphasis on epistemologies of modeling and the blending of documentary and creative practices for studying the historical built environment.

Past Postdoctoral Fellows

Ashley Reed, English and Comparative Literature (2014-2015)

Ashley Reed holds an appointment in the Department of English. She is also affiliated with the William and Ida Friday Center for Continuing Education, where she will teach online digital humanities courses. Reed received her PhD in English and Comparative Literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she was the long-time project manager for the William Blake Archive. Her dissertation examines the relationship between belief and agency in nineteenth-century literature by women and African Americans, including Catharine Maria Sedgwick, William Wells Brown, Susan Warner, Augusta Jane Evans, and Elizabeth Stoddard. More broadly, her interests include American literature and culture to 1900, American Studies, religion, gender studies, and digital humanities. As a Fellow in the Digital Innovation Lab, Reed will contribute to our ongoing efforts to promote use of the digital NC Newspapers collection, a digitization collaboration between UNC Libraries, Newspapers.com, and the DIL.

Marten Düring, History Department (Spring 2014)

Marten Düring is a cultural historian (PhD, University of Mainz, 2012) with a background in European history and Memory studies, and a strong interest in interdisciplinary research methods in (Digital) History, social network analysis, and text analytics. His research focuses on trans-national memories of the Second World War, covert support networks during the Holocaust, and Dutch-German-Allied perceptions of the end of the war in the Dutch-German border region. He taught HIST 890-005: Digital History: Trends, Challenges and the Future of the Historical Method, while developing his own project, MERIT—Machine-based Extraction of Relations in Text. MERIT harnesses the power of computational linguistic tools and combines them with historical hermeneutics. He also contributed to the DIL’s Slave Narrative Name/Place Database Project.