Plenary Speakers

Manan Ahmed

Columbia University

Assistant Professor of History

Co-founder, Group for Experimental Methods in the Humanities

The Heyman Center for the Humanities

Manan Ahmed works on medieval and early modern histories of space and polity in South Asia. He is the author of A Book of Conquest: The Chachnama and Muslim Origins in South Asia (Harvard UP, 2016). His interests in digital history are currently focused on affective mapping, non-Roman text processing and network analysis. He has led a number of digital history seminars in Lahore, Pakistan, and is broadly committed to thinking about issues of equity, diversity and gender in global digital humanities. At Columbia, he is co-founder of Columbia’s Group for Experimental Methods in the Humanities. He can be reached via @sepoy or http://www.columbia.edu/~ma3179

Ting Ting Cheng

(Bard College alumna)

Legal Director of the Women’s March on Washington

Public Defender at Brooklyn Defense Services

Ting Ting is a human rights lawyer. She is originally from Shanghai. Her background is in music and human rights, she has spent her youth playing the oboe with various orchestras around the country, notably with the American Symphony Orchestra. Ting Ting’s human rights work has taken her all over the world. After law school, Ting Ting clerked at the Constitutional Court of South Africa for Justices Albie Sachs and Edwin Cameron. Following her clerkship, she was Senior Project Manager at the Incentives for Global Health, an international non-profit organization which uses medical innovation to increase research and development for neglected diseases for the global poor. Most recently, she was a public defender with Brooklyn Defender Services, where she also represented immigrants and victims of human trafficking. Ting Ting was a 2009 Fulbright Scholar to South Africa, for which she received the Amy Biehl award.


Treva Lindsey

Ohio State University

Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Fellow for Research on Women and Girls of Color at the W.E.B. Du Bois Research Institute at the Hutchins Center (Currently)

Treva Lindsey’s research and teaching interests include African American women’s history, black popular and expressive culture, black feminism(s), hip hop studies, critical race and gender theory, and sexual politics.  She has published in numerous journals, including most recently The Black Scholar, Feminist Studies, Urban Education, African American Review, and The Journal of African American Studies. She is the author of Colored No More: New Negro Womanhood in the Nation’s Capital in production at the University of Illinois Press (Fall 2016). She is the co-editor of a forthcoming collection on the future of Black Popular Culture Studies and is building a strong online presence by guest contributing to online forums such as Al Jazeera, Cosmopolitan, HuffPost Live, and The Left of Black Web Series. She was also the state coordinator for the Black Lives Matter: Cbus to Ferguson Ride.

Hoyt Long

University of Chicago

Associate Professor, Japanese Literature, East Asian Languages and Civilizations

Co-Director of Text Lab

Hoyt Long is the author of On Uneven Ground: Miyazawa Kenji and the Making of Place in Modern Japan (2012), and has published extensively in the field of media history and digital humanities. Most recently, he has co-authored “Literary Pattern Recognition: Modernism Between Close Reading and Machine Learning” (Critical Inquiry, Winter 2016) and “Turbulent Flow: A Computational Model of World Literature” (Modern Language Quarterly, Fall 2016). He co-directs the Chicago Text Lab with Richard Jean So and taught at Bard from 2007 to 2011.

Heather Love

University of Pennsylvania

Associate Professor of English

The Center for the Study of Social Difference

Heather Love teaches English and Gender Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Harvard), the editor of a special issue of GLQ on Gayle Rubin (“Rethinking Sex”), and the co-editor of a special issue of Representations (“Description Across Disciplines”). Love has written on topics including comparative social stigma, compulsory happiness, transgender fiction, spinster aesthetics, reading methods in literary studies, and the history of deviance studies. She is currently completing a book on practices of description in the humanities and social sciences.

Dennis Tenen

Columbia University

Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature

Co-founder, Group for Experimental Methods in the Humanities

Columbia University School of the Arts’ Digital Storytelling Lab

New Media Center at the Institute for Data Sciences and Engineering

Berkman Center for Internet and Society

metaLab [at] Harvard

Institute for Comparative Literature and Society

The Association for Computers and the Humanities

Dennis Tenen teaches courses on literary theory, media studies, and critical computing at the Department of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University. His research happens at the intersection of texts, people, and technology. He is one of the founders of Columbia’s Group for Experimental Methods in the Humanities and author of Plain Text: The Poetics of Computation (Stanford UP, 2017). You can find him on Twitter @dennistenen, GitHub at github.com/denten, and at http://denten.plaintext.in/.

Featured Speakers

T.L. Cowan

University of Toronto

Assistant Professor, Digital Media Cultures

Department of Arts, Culture & Media (UTSC)

Faculty of Information (iSchool)

FemTechNet

Presidential Visiting Professor in Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies at Yale University (previous)

T.L. Cowan is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies (Digital Media Cultures) in the Department of Arts, Culture and Media (UTSC) and the Faculty of Information (iSchool) at the University of Toronto. T.L.’s research focuses on cultural and intellectual economies and networks of minoritized digital media and performance practices, taking shape in two book projects. T.L. is also the Primary Investigator on a collaborative digital research-creation project called the Cabaret Commons: an online archive and anecdotal encyclopedia for trans-feminist and queer artists, audiences and researchers, and is writing a co-authored book entitled Checking In: Feminist Labor in Networked Publics & Privates with Jasmine Rault. T.L.’s scholarly practice moves between page, stage, and screen; recent notable commissions for her creative-critical work include the PlugIn Institute of Contemporary Art in Winnipeg and Queens Museum in New York City.

Angel David Nieves

Hamilton College

Associate Professor of Africana Studies & Digital Humanities

Director, American Studies Program

Director, Cinema & Media Studies Program

Co-Director/Co-PI, Digital Humanities Initiative (DHi)

Angel Nieves’s research and community-based activism engages critically with issues of race and the built environment in cities across the Global South. His co-edited book “We Shall Independent Be:” African American Place-Making and the Struggle to Claim Space in the U.S. was published in 2008.  He is completing a manuscript entitled, “We Gave Our Hearts and Lives To It:” Black Women and Nation-Building in the New South, with the University of Rochester Press for their series “Gender and Race in American History.”  He is also currently working on a new volume in the Debates in the Digital Humanities Series and on a special collaborative issue of American Quarterly (2018) on DH in the field of American Studies.  He is co-editor (w/Kim Gallon, Purdue) of a new book series at the University of Georgia Press, The Black Spatial Humanities: Theories, Methods, and Praxis in Digital Humanities.  He serves on the Modern Language Association’s (MLA) Committee on Information Technology (2016-2019).  His digital research and scholarship have been featured on MSNBC.com and in Newsweek International.

His work can be found at http://www.apartheidheritages.org

Paolo Pedercini

Carnegie Mellon University

Visiting Assistant Professor, School of Art

Molleindustria

Paolo Pedercini is a game developer, artist and educator. He teaches digital media production and experimental game design at the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University. Since 2003 he works under the project name “Molleindustria” producing provocative games addressing issues of social and environmental justice (McDonald’s videogame, Oiligarchy, Phone Story), labor and alienation (Every Day the Same Dream, Unmanned), and urbanism (Nova Alea).

Nicole Starosielski

The New York University Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development

Assistant Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication

Nicole Starosielski is Assistant Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication. She is author of The Undersea Network (Duke University Press, 2015), which charts the development of transoceanic cable systems, and co-editor of Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructure (University of Illinois Press, 2015), Sustainable Media: Critical Approaches to Media and Environment (Routledge, 2016), and the “Elements” book series at Duke University Press. Her current project, Media Hot and Cold, traces the relationship between media technologies, embodied perception, and thermal conditions.