Events //
Digital Humanities Fellows Presentations & Lunch: Ethan Reed & Julia Haines
Event Info
Date:Wednesday, 05/2/2018
Time:10:30AM-1:30PM
Place:Alderman Library, Room 421
Registration:Required! Details below.
Event Info

Join Julia Haines and Ethan Reed as they give presentations on the work they have done during the course of their Graduate Fellowships in Digital Humanities in collaboration with the Scholars’ Lab. The event will run from 10:30-12:00 with lunch provided to follow.

Ethan Reed

Ethan is a PhD candidate in Department of English. His dissertation, “The Radical Sensibility: Cultures of Discontent in American Literature after 1934,” investigates the articulation of feelings associated with injustice—such as frustration or anger—as they relate to race, class, and gender in recent US literary history. As a Graduate Fellow, Ethan has worked on “Measured Unrest in the Poetry of the Black Arts Movement,” a project that uses quantitative methods—a machine reading technique called sentiment analysis—to examine a corpus of revolutionary poetry from the Black Arts Movement. A body of work famous for tying heightened affects to an explicitly political quest for racial justice in America, this poetry was also written in the shadow of government surveillance programs, active FBI counterintelligence operations, and a larger culture fearful of radical thought. In this sense, Ethan’s project explores the fraught methodological implications of using distanced, potentially decontextualizing computational text analysis techniques to think through BAM poetry, and how these methods might best be used to pursue questions, problems, and lines of inquiry centered around black thought and experience.

Julia Jong Haines

I am currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at UVa. Since 2012 I have been conducting archeological research in Mauritius with the Mauritius Archaeology and Cultural Heritage (MACH) project. My dissertation research investigates the ruins of a 19th century sugar estate, the material culture excavated from the laborers’ village on the plantation, and colonial archival records inside Bras d’Eau National park, Mauritius. Through archaeology and the material world, I am interested in understanding expressions of immigrant identities within global colonial contexts.

My dissertation research focuses on the archaeology of Asian indentured laborers who migrated to the small SW Indian Ocean island of Mauritius during the 19th century to work on sugar plantations in the wake of the abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire. I from 2015 to 2016 conducted 17 months of archaeological survey, excavations and archival fieldwork in Bras d’Eau National Park, a well-preserved colonial sugar estate.  During my DH fellowship I focused on reworking the data I collected, including maps of archaeological ruins, sketches from excavations and of artifacts collected, and extensive artifact catalogues. Recreating the material world through digital mediums such as ArcGIS, Adobe Illustrator and 3D printing, allowed me to better understand how the daily activities of indentured women, men, and children shaped the cultural and environmental landscape in colonial Mauritius and fit more broadly in Indian Ocean World networks.

Notes
  • Questions?
    Contact Scholars' Lab's Head of Public Programs Laura Miller.