Category: People

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dani garcia

Bio: dani garcia holds a B.A. Religious Studies, California State University, Fullerton; an M.A. in Linguistics, California State University, Long Beach; and an M.A. English, Arizona State University. A PhD Candidate in English, dani’s area of interest is 19th and 20th-century non-canonical American literature, focusing on literature by, for, and about migrant, immigrant, and underrepresented populations. This research integrates a range of digital tools for text mining to support critical literary analysis. As part of the fellowship program, dani has worked on Morris Eaves’ Blake Archive project and Michael Jarvis’ Digital Kormantin project. Currently, dani is working with the Rochester Public Library on the Archive of Black History project. Fall 2023 cohort. (dgarc20@ur.rochester.edu)

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Bridget Fleming

Bio: Bridget Fleming is a 6th year Ph.D. Candidate in the Visual and Cultural Studies program at the University of Rochester. Her research interests include: contemporary art, feminism, experimental film, sound studies, and collaborative art practices. Her dissertation focuses on histories of feminist film and video production, paying particular attention to the treatment of the voice by feminist practitioners. Her digital humanities project builds on this research. In collaboration with the Visual Studies Workshop’s curator Tara Nelson, and preservation specialist Nilson Carroll, Bridget is working on a project to digitally enhance the Portable Channel Collection using Mediate. Portable Channel is a collection of videos made by artists and activists working in Rochester during the 1970s. Bridget will be in conversation with community member to digitally annotate a selection of Portable Channel videos and make it newly accessible to both researchers and the Rochester community. The collaborative project will eventually be housed on a website, created on Omeka S. Fall 2024 cohort. (bflemin6@ur.rochester.edu)

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Lauren Berlin

Bio: Lauren Berlin is PhD candidate in musicology whose work explores the intersection of television, broadcasting history, and music. Her digital humanities project challenges the dominance of visual data in historical research by emphasizing the significance of sound and auditory archives, particularly in understanding cultural history. She asks how library catalog entries can express racial tensions at play in musical programming on TV, particularly in the afterlife of minstrelsy out of blackface. Her project leverages the extensive – but unprocessed – J. Fred and Leslie MacDonald Collection at the Library of Congress to develop more robust metadata schemas and tagging conventions to facilitate deeper archival and cultural analysis. Fall 2024 cohort. (lberlin@u.Rochester.edu)

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Jeffrey W. Baron

Bio: (https://baron.digitalscholar.rochester.edu/) is a PhD candidate in History at the University of Rochester. His dissertation examines treasure law in the medieval and early modern Hispanic world. With the support of the Meliora Digital and Interdisciplinary Fellowship, he is producing a digital database and GIS mapping project that compiles and visualizes premodern treasure-hunting and grave-robbing excavations across Iberia, Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. Fall 2024 cohort. (jbaron4@ur.rochester.edu)

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Anna Ania Michas

Education: MA University of Rochester, History; Andrew W. Mellon Advanced Residency Program in Photograph Conservation, Image Permanence Institute, Rochester Institute of Technology, and George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY; Postgraduate Study in Culture Management, Warsaw School of Economics, Warsaw, Poland; MA, Nicholas Copernicus University, Torun, Poland, Conservation and Restoration of Art.

Bio: Ania Michas is a sixth-year PhD student in the Department of History and Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester.

Ania’s studies include modern European history and the democratization of art enabled by photography. Her dissertation examines the use of postcards by women as a tool for their emancipation and explores the role that postcards played in the development of feminist ideas. She is interested in how postcards served democracy as a “common experience” of communication and collecting.

By incorporating DH methods into her research, she hopes to reveal commonalities and outliers in the collections with which she works and to tie the stories of her dissertation more closely together.

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Erin Francisco

Education: B.A., Elmira College, English, 2009; M.F.A., California College of the Arts, Writing, 2011; M.A., University of Rochester, English, 2018. 

Bio: Erin Francisco is a third-year Ph.D. student in the English Department at the University of Rochester specializing in twentieth-century American literature. Her research interests are grounded in Environmental Humanities with a particular focus on back-to-the-land memoirs and critical discourse surrounding race, gender, and nature in both fiction and non-fiction narratives.

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Dan Gorman

Education: M.A., University of Rochester, History, 2017; M.A., Villanova University, History, 2016; B.A., University of Rochester, History & Religion, 2014.

Bio: Daniel Gorman Jr. is a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at the University of Rochester. 

Dan studies nineteenth- and twentieth-century religious and cultural history in the United States. His dissertation explores the expulsion of Spiritualist medium Frederick Willis from Harvard in 1857 and the ensuing debate between Spiritualists and anti-Spiritualists that occurred in the greater Boston area,. This project illuminates differing ideas of the function of religion and science in U.S. society, as well as the relationship between Spiritualism and the broader liberal religious movement in New England. In the digital realm, Dan is interested in online archives and oral history repositories, digital mapping, and documentary editing.

Mellon Activities:

  • Website editor for Digitizing Rochester’s Religions, a project directed by Dr. Margarita Guillory (Boston University).
  • Project Assistant at the William Blake Archive, 2019–20.
  • Organized the May 2020 Mellon virtual symposium with Erin Francisco-Opalich, Madeline Ullrich, and Alexander Zawacki.
  • Volunteered with high school civics programs that the YMCA of Montgomery, Alabama, has hosted virtually because of COVID19 — the 2020 YMCA Conference on National Affairs, the 2020 Alabama Youth Legislature, and the 2021 Alabama Youth Judicial Program.
  • Digital technology consultant on the UR International Theatre Program’s virtual production of The Government Inspector. The play streamed on Vimeo from December 11–13, 2020.
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Madeline Ullrich

Education: BA, American University, Art History, 2014; MA, University of British Columbia, Art History and Theory, 2017

Bio: Madeline Ullrich is a third-year PhD student in the Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester.

Maddie’s current research explores visual and narrative forms of female collectivity on television, to investigate how contemporary mainstream feminism imagines collectivity as its mode of subjectivity. Thinking through the televisual quality of seriality, her research explores how the concept of a female collective is constructed through visual and narrative paradigms of repetition, accumulation and standardization.

Currently, Maddie is working with the University of Rochester’s Digital Scholarship Lab on Mediate, a web-based platform that allows users to annotate and analyze time-based audiovisual media.

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Alexander J. Zawacki

Education: BS, Susquehanna University, Ecology, 2013; MA, Bangor University, Medieval literature, 2016.

Bio: Alex is a fourth-year PhD student in English at the University of Rochester. He is also an operations coordinator at the Lazarus Project, which uses multispectral imaging and statistical processing software to digitally recover damaged manuscripts and cultural heritage objects. His research focuses on ghosts, horror, and hermeneutics in the Middle Ages. 

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Camden Burd

Education: BA, History, University of Utah, 2011; MA, History, Central Michigan University, 2014; MA, History, University of Rochester, 2015.

Biography: Camden Burd is a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History. His research explores the environmental transformation of the American landscape over the course of the nineteenth century. Continue reading “Camden Burd”