ABOUT ME

Kenton Rambsy (University of Kansas 15) is an Associate Professor of African American literature and digital humanities at Howard University. He received his PhD in English from the University of Kansas in May 2015. He is a 2010 Magna Cum-Laude, Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Morehouse College.

At the University of Texas Arlington, Kenton teaches “The Jay Z Class.” This digital humanities course places the rapper in a broad African American literary continuum of autobiographical and semi-autobiographical works. In the class, students create datasets on Jay Z in order to produce thematic data visualizations, literary timelines, and a list of key terms that demonstrated the literary merit of rap music and its close ties to the larger field of African American literature. 

As an undergraduate and graduate student, Kenton had unique knowledge building experiences organizing digital archives having served as a research assistant at both Vanderbilt University’s Bishop Joseph Johnson Black Cultural Center in Nashville, Tennessee and Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History in Atlanta, Georgia. During the summer of 2009, Kenton received a Schomburg-Mellon Humanities Fellowship. As a fellow, he helped to work on the Digital Schomburg database.

At the University of Kansas, Kenton served as Project digital initiative coordinator the Project on the History of Black Writing (HBW). In this position, Kenton initiated a host of project such as founding the African American literary blog and overseeing digital projects using text-mining and topic modeling tools to explore HBW’s robust collection of over 1500 black novels.

Kenton’s current research with data analytics has led to his receiving significant funding for on-going projects.