Space and Place in Africana/Black Studies: An Institute on Spatial Humanities Theories, Methods and Practice for Africana Studies (NEH Sponsored)

Purdue University

West Lafayette, Indiana

June 5 – 26, 2016

Institute Faculty

From June 5 – 26, I had the privilege to serve as institute faculty at the NEH funded “Space & Place in Africana/Black Studies” summer institute co-directed by Professors Kim Gallon (Purdue University) and Angel David Nieves (Hamilton College).

The institute brought together twenty early and mid-career Africana/Black Studies scholars, graduate students, librarians and archivists as a means of “bringing Africana/Black Studies scholars into the fold of digital humanities through the critical nexus of race and space. The Institute also prepared participants to view Black Digital Humanities as a way to challenge and transform discourse and activities across the humanities.”

My presentation addressed how geography can facilitate engagements with African American literature and digital humanities. Specifically, I focused on aspects of cultural geo-tagging (similar to my work on writer Edward P. Jones) as I explored 10 short stories by Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright and explain how quantitative data can assist in identifying a variety of stylistic features of the South and southern literature.