Digital Justice Fellow, Chesapeake Heartland: An African American Humanities Project at Washington College

Job Title: Digital Justice Fellow

Location: Chestertown, MD

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Washington College invites applications for a one-year Digital Justice Fellowship with the Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience. This fellowship is funded through the American Council of Learned Societies Digital Justice program, which seeks to “diversify the digital domain, advance justice and equity in digital scholarly practice and/or contribute to public understanding of racial and social justice issues.”

The Digital Justice Fellow, working closely with campus, community, and institutional partners, will implement new archival partnerships in the region, launch an interpretative planning process for the project’s website and digital archive and conduct archival research for Chesapeake Heartland: An African American Humanities Project.

Begun through a partnership with the National Museum of African American History and Culture, with funding from the Mellon Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, and others, the Chesapeake Heartland project has developed a robust digital archive and interactive website that preserve, interpret, and share materials related to African American history and culture on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay. This innovative project seeks to delineate the Chesapeake Bay watershed as a national heartland of African American history and culture, emphasizing “community curation,” in which members of the general public collect, share, and interpret the histories of their own families and communities. In its next phase, the project aims to incorporate institutional archival collections into the digital archive, as well as to create an interpretive framework that will contextualize digitized materials within four centuries of the African American experience.

The Digital Justice Fellow will play an essential role in crafting an interpretive plan that presents the project in a compelling, nuanced, and responsive way. They will also play a central role in bringing distant and hidden archival histories home to local community members. This Digital Justice Fellow will focus on the following four specific functions:

• Launching “digital repatriation” partnerships with three major archival institutions—the Maryland State Archives, the Maryland Center for History and Culture, and the American Antiquarian Society—which hold significant material reflecting the Black history of the Eastern Shore of Maryland and are committed to making it accessible to communities of origin;
• Assessing those repositories’ collections, determining their extent, content, state of preservation, and relevance;
• Spearheading outreach to the broader scholarly community, including working with the project team to convene a Historians Committee that will bring together scholars and digital humanists with local stakeholders and tradition-bearers;
• Conducting benchmarking research on relevant public history and digital humanities projects whose work will inform Chesapeake Heartland.

Qualifications include:

• Experience with archival research in African American studies
• Experience with public history research and/or programming
• Working familiarity with digital humanities and a strong interest in developing experience in the field
• Effective communication and presentation skills