The following people have taught and presented in the NYU Abu Dhabi Winter Institute in Digital Humanities. The hashtag following their bio indicates the year of participation.
Amar Ahmad was awarded a Ph.D. in Statistics by the University of Munich in 2007. This follows a German Diplom in Statistics in 2003 by the University of Munich in Germany. Ahmad worked as a research assistant at the University of Munich in 2003. In 2007, he worked on the statistical analysis of clinical trial methodology at Bayer Pharmaceuticals in Berlin, Germany. Ahmad moved to London University in 2009 to work at the Institute of Cancer Research and later in 2010 at Queen Mary University of London. In November 2019, he started working as a biostatistician at NYUAD #2024
Nada Ammagui is a Postgraduate Research Fellow in the Arts & Humanities at NYU Abu Dhabi conducting research on histories of cultural institutions and contemporary art in Sharjah, UAE. She employs interdisciplinary methods, ranging from ethnography and archival exploration to data analysis and digital mapping, to examine the spatial and temporal dimensions of Sharjah’s art scene. She also writes a blog on research in the humanities to help young scholars navigate academic waters. Nada graduated from NYU Abu Dhabi with a B.A. in Arab Crossroads Studies and minor in Art History. #2021
Alyssa Arbuckle is the Associate Director of the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab (ETCL) at the University of Victoria (Canada), Co-Facilitator for the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) Partnership Community Cluster, and a member of the Directorial Group and the Operational Team for the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI). Alyssa is also an interdisciplinary PhD Candidate at the University of Victoria, studying open social scholarship and its implementation. From studying digital humanities, new media, and American literature, her work now explores open access, digital publishing, and how we can share academic research more broadly. Alyssa’s work has appeared in Digital Studies, Digital Humanities Quarterly, and Digital Scholarship in the Humanities and she has recently co-edited print and online book collections titled Social Knowledge Creation in the Humanities and Feminist War Games: Mechanisms of War, Feminist Values, and Interventional Games. #2020 #2021
Moses Boudourides is a Visiting Professor of Mathematics at NYU Abu Dhabi. He is also in the Faculty of Northwestern University School of Professional Studies Data Science Program and Affiliated Faculty at the Science of Networks in Communities (SONIC) at Northwestern University. He is interested in social networks, computational social science and digital humanities. In particular, his work in digital humanities is focused on networks of literary text and data analysis of scientometric datasets with emphasis on the temporal assortativity of various attributes in co-authorship and co-publication networks (as authors’ gender, publication keywords and journals’ Open Access type). Early in 2019 he was awarded a Robert K. Merton Visiting Research Fellowship from the Institute for Analytical Sociology (IAS) at Linköping University in Sweden. #2020
Diana Chester is a sound studies scholar, educator, and artist whose work uses sound to traverse disciplinary boundaries and explore sonic capacities core to the human condition. Current Projects include, ‘Listening to Earth,’ which develops listening instruments to record memories stored inside Earth, and ‘Sounding the Ice,’ a partnership with the Australia Antarctic Division using data sonification to express changes to sea-ice. Diana’s monograph, Sonic Encounters: The Islamic Call to Prayer is a glimpse into the creative, methodological, and artistic practices of making field recordings of the Islamic call to prayer, and sits alongside a broader body of academic and creative work presented and exhibited across five continents. Chester is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication at the University of Sydney, editor of Interference Journal, and vice president of the World Listening Project. #2024
Carol Chiodo is the Director of Distinctive Collections and Digital Scholarship at The Claremont Colleges Library. A former book editor and translator, she now stewards special collections for the Claremont Colleges and develops transformative ways for researchers to engage with our collections. Prior to her position at Claremont, Carol was the Librarian for Collections and Digital Scholarship at Harvard University Library. Carol earned her Ph.D. in Italian at Yale and was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship at The Franke Family Digital Humanities Laboratory at Yale University Library and the Institute of Sacred Music. Her research focuses on the application of computational methods to support the study of cultural heritage. She is committed to programs and services that sustain interdisciplinary, collaborative, and open-access scholarship. Her work on cultural heritage collections as data has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. A lifelong learner, Carol is also a passionate instructor, having taught courses in culture and computational methods at Yale, Princeton, Harvard, Université Bourgogne-Franche-Comté, University of Leipzig, Babeș-Bolyai University, and NYU Abu Dhabi. #2020 #2021
Kim Fox is a professor of practice at The American University in Cairo (AUC) in Egypt. Her primary area of interest is radio/audio/podcasting. Regarding podcasts, she uniquely conducts academic research, produces and teaches. With a focus on feminist pedagogy, oral history methodology and project-based learning (PBL), she has coached her students to win a long list of international audio awards and recognitions. Kim is the executive producer of the award-winning Ehky Ya Masr (Tell Your Story Egypt) Podcast. It’s a narrative nonfiction bilingual podcast about life in Egypt. She is also the executive producer of PodFest Cairo, Egypt and Africa’s first podcasting conference; an annual event based in Cairo. Her scholarly research includes a focus on Black and African podcasters including the following: Egyptian female podcasters: shaping feminist identities, African Podcasting: Challenges and Chances, A Curriculum for Blackness: Podcasts as Discursive Cultural Guides, 2010-2020. #2021 #2024
Estelle Guéville is an Assistant Researcher at the Louvre Abu Dhabi. She graduated from Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne University and developed her professional experience in several institutions in France and in the Gulf. As a medievalist, she is interested in applying digital methods and comparative approaches for the study of manuscripts. #2021
Taylor Hixson was the Librarian for Geospatial Data Services at NYU Abu Dhabi Library, where she worked with faculty, researchers, and students to integrate geospatial data, tools, and workflows into their research. Her MS is in information sciences from The University of Tennessee, where she focused in geographic information. Taylor taught Spatial Humanities at the inaugural NYUAD Winter Institute in Digital Humanities, and she enjoys mapping popular culture. #2020 #2021
Najla Jarkas is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at the American University of Beirut (Lebanon), where she teaches Digital Humanities courses. She is interested in exploring ways DH tools “read” works of Modern English literature. At present, she is engaged in two DH projects: “Books Read over Time, Space and Emotions” and “The Orientalists.” She serves on the Coordinating Committee of the biennial Digital Humanities Institute Beirut. She is the Member Coordinator of AMICAL’s Digital Liberal Arts Initiatives and has just recently joined the International Advisory Board of the Digital Humanities Summer Institute, University of Victoria, Canada. #2020
Graham Jensen is an Assistant Director and Mitacs Accelerate Postdoctoral Fellow in Open, Collaborative Scholarship (Arts & Humanities) in the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab at the University of Victoria. He is co-lead of research, development, and strategy on the Canadian Humanities and Social Sciences Commons. He is also Principal Investigator of the Canadian Modernist Magazines Project. Previously at the University of Victoria, he was a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow and Limited Term Assistant Professor in English. His research interests include twentieth- and twenty-first-century Canadian literatures, modernism, literature and religion, and digital humanities approaches to open publishing, pedagogy, and community-building.
Kimon Keramidas is Head of Digital Content and Strategy at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York City, which promotes understanding of the ideas, cultures, and art of Himalayan regions. Prior to the Rubin, Kimon was Associate Professor of Experimental Humanities and Social Engagement at NYU and Assistant Professor and Director of the Digital Media Lab at the Bard Graduate Center (BGC). Recent projects include Project Himalayan Art, a digital platform about Himalayan art and culture, The Sogdians: Influencers on the Silk Roads a digital global art history project, and The Interface Experience: Forty Years of Personal Computing, a transmediated exhibition/book/digital experience on the history of personal computing #2020 #2021 #2024
Salam Khalifa is a research assistant at the CAMeL Lab at NYU Abu Dhabi. Her current research focuses on morphological modeling for Arabic. She worked on developing corpora, morphological lexicons, morphological disambiguation systems, and other morphological resources for low-resource Arabic varieties. #2020 #2021
Randa El Khatib is the MITACS Accelerate and INKE Partnership Postdoctoral Fellow in Open Social Scholarship in the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab at the University of Victoria. She is also the Co-Director of the Digital Humanities Summer Institute with Alyssa Arbuckle and Ray Siemens. Until recently, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto Scarborough and the Editor of Early Modern Digital Review, a journal that reviews digital projects that study the early modern world. In 2015, Randa co-founded the Digital Humanities Institute – Beirut — the first digital humanities training institute in the Middle East — with David Joseph Wrisley #2020 #2024
Suphan Kirmizialtin is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern History at NYU Abu Dhabi. Her research interests center around the intersection of gender and modernization in the Middle East within the specific context of the Ottoman modernization project. Her current research involves deep learning methods for the automated transcription and analysis of historical archives as well as crowdsourced transcription of Ottoman Turkish print media. #2021 #2024
Aaron Mauro is an Assistant Professor of Digital Media in the Faculty of Humanities at Brock University (Canada), where he is a member of the Centre for Digital Humanities. He teaches on topics relating to digital culture, natural language processing, data visualization, and user interface design. His monograph, “Human Exploits, Cyberpunk, and the Digital Humanities,” is forthcoming from Bloomsbury Publishing. His articles on U.S. literature and culture have appeared in Modern Fiction Studies, Mosaic, and Symploke among others. He has also published on issues relating to digital humanities in both Digital Studies and Digital Humanities Quarterly. #2020 #2021
Nirmala Menon is Professor in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS), Discipline of English, IIT Indore. She is the Chair of the newly established Jay Prakash Narayan National Centre of Excellence in the Humanities (jpnnationalcentre.com). She leads the Digital Humanities and Publishing Research Group at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Indore, India. Menon is the author of Migrant Identities of Creole Cosmopolitans: Transcultural Narratives of Contemporary Postcoloniality (Peter Lang Publishing, Germany, 2014) and Remapping the Postcolonial Canon: Remap, Reimagine, Retranslate (Palgrave Macmillan, UK 2017). She is the Co-Editor of the first multilingual Volume of E-literature published from India, Ubiquity Press, 2023 . She is Co-Editor of the forthcoming Learning by Practice: Digital Humanities Projects from India to be published by Routledge UK in 2023. Apart from the books, she has published more than 50 research papers in numerous international journals (Oxford University Press, Taylor and Francis, Sage among others) and speaks, writes and publishes about postcolonial studies, digital Humanities and scholarly publishing. She mentors research scholars and runs DH projects from the research lab at IIT Indore. Her research group works on Digital Projects relating to Cultural Heritage through both creation and curation of Archives and Databases. She is the Project Director for KSHIP (Knowledge Sharing in Publishing), an Open Access Publishing platform. Dr Menon has received various national and international grants and awards (MHRD, SPARC, UKEIRI, Academia Europaea among others). #2024
Ossama Obeid is a research assistant at the CAMeL Lab at NYU Abu Dhabi. He is the primary developer on CAMeL Tools, a suite of Python libraries and command-line tools for Arabic natural language processing. #2020 #2021
Jean-Christophe Peyssard is the Head of Multimedia Library at the Maison méditerranéenne des sciences de l’Homme (MMSH, CNRS – Aix-Marseille University, France). As a Research Engineer at CNRS his fields of expertise cover scholarly communication, scientific publishing, library science, Open Access, and digital preservation. He is a member of the research program Shakk, From revolt to War in Syria : Conflict, displacements, uncertainties. Within this program, he is in charge of archiving Web content linked to the revolt and War in Syria. #2020 #2021 #2024
Gustavo Riva is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Heidelberg (Germany), and member of the Collaborative Research Centre ‘Material Text Cultures’, where I work on digital publications and research tools for the Humanities <https://www.materiale-textkulturen.de/person.php?n=305>. I was originally trained as a medievalist in Argentina, Portugal and Germany. I’ve studied mostly German, French and Iberian literatures of the High Middle Ages, but I’m passionate about all things medieval. As a digital humanist, I’ve been working on digital scholarly editing, network analysis, and distant reading. #2021
Beth Russell is the Associate Director for Research Services and Strategy and Associate Academic Librarian at the NYU Abu Dhabi Library, where she directs the Library’s programs in digital scholarship, collections, and research services. She is co-founder of the NYU Abu Dhabi Winter Institute in Digital Humanities with David Wrisley. #2020 #2021 #2024
Ray Siemens is Distinguished Professor in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Victoria, Canada, in English and Computer Science, and past Canada Research Chair in Humanities Computing; in 2019, he was also Leverhulme Visiting Professor at U Loughborough and, 2019-22, Global Innovation Chair in Digital Humanities in the Centre for 21st Century Humanities at U Newcastle. He is founding editor of the electronic scholarly journal Early Modern Literary Studies, and his publications include, among others, Blackwell’s Companion to Digital Humanities (2004, 2015 with Schreibman and Unsworth), the Companion to Digital Literary Studies (2007, with Schreibman), A Social Edition of the Devonshire MS (2012, 2015; MRTS/Iter & Wikibooks, with Crompton et al.), Literary Studies in the Digital Age (2014; MLA, with Price), Doing Digital Humanities(2017; Routledge, with Crompton and Lane), and The Lyrics of the Henry VIII MS (2018; RETS). He directs the Implementing New Knowledge Environments project, the Digital Humanities Summer Institute, and the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab, recently serving as a member of governing council for the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, as Vice President / Director of the Canadian Federation of the Humanities and Social Sciences (for Research Dissemination), Chair of the MLA Committee on Scholarly Editions, and Chair of the international Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations. #2024
Puthiya Purayil Sneha works with the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), Bangalore. Her work primarily engages with shifts in modes and practices of knowledge production in the humanities and arts with the digital turn. Her areas of interest include digital media and cultures, higher education and pedagogy, and access to knowledge. Her recent work is on mapping initiatives in the field of digital humanities in India, with a focus on the digital transition in GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums), writing on gendered labour and women’s work in the digital economy, and understanding challenges and opportunities of creating a multilingual internet. She is the author of Mapping Digital Humanities in India. #2020
Lauren Tilton is the E. Claiborne Robins Professor of Liberal Arts in the Department of Rhetoric & Communication Studies and directs the Distant Viewing Lab at the University of Richmond. Her research focuses on analyzing, developing, and applying computational methods to study visual culture. Her work has been featured in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, and Journal of Cultural Analytics, and her most recent book Distant Viewing: Analyzing Images at Scale (The MIT Press) is open access. She directs Photogrammar.org and serves on The Association for Computers and the Humanities. She received her PhD in American Studies from Yale University. #2020 #2024
Victor Westrich (he/him) is a MA Candidate in Digital Methods in the Humanities and Cultural Sciences at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and Mainz University of Applied Sciences (Germany). He is a researcher in training at @regestaimperii at Mainz Academy of Sciences and Literature. Victor has worked on mapping projects in Paris and Göttingen and digital editing projects in Erlangen and Berlin. #2021
Nicholas Wolf is a research data management librarian and interim co-head of NYU Data Services, part of the NYU Division of Libraries. He specializes in the history of nineteenth-century Ireland and New York City. Among the many text-as-data projects he has worked on have been an analysis of the contents of nineteenth-century Irish-language manuscripts, an effort to extract nearly 8 million entries from New York City printed directories of the 1800s, and, most recently, a grant-funded project to study the textual data embedded in the NYPL’s nineteenth-century Brown Brothers financial account ledgers. #2020 #2021 #2024
David Joseph Wrisley is Professor of Digital Humanities at NYU Abu Dhabi. His research interests include comparative approaches to medieval literature in European languages and Arabic, digital spatial approaches to corpora, neural methods for handwritten text recognition across writing systems and open knowledge community building in the Middle East where he has lived and researched since 2002. Current research projects include the Paris Bible Project, OpenGulf and Dish by Dish. He co-founded the Digital Humanities Institute Beirut in 2015 with Randa El Khatib. He is the co-founder of the NYU Abu Dhabi Winter Institute in Digital Humanities with Beth Russell. #2020 #2021 #2024
Mai Zaki is an Associate Professor at the American University of Sharjah, UAE. She earned her PhD degree in Linguistics from Middlesex University, UK, where she worked as a Lecturer and programme leader prior to moving to the UAE. Her teaching experience includes courses in Arabic linguistics, corpus linguistics, digital humanities and translation. Her research interests are focused on digital humanities, textual and spatial analysis of Arabic (especially modern Arabic literature), Arabic social media, and cultural analytics. #2024
