2024-25 FeLLOWS
Seth Cook, Lecturer of Photography, Department of Art
"Digital Curation and Documentation of Lockerly Arboretum"
This photography project seeks to create a comprehensive digital collection of high-quality photographs that capture the rich, diverse collections of Lockerly Arboretum. This collaboration will offer photography students an educational experience in creating sharp, high-quality photographs while also providing them with valuable, hands-on experience in digital archiving. Utilizing digital cameras provided by the Department of Art, students will play a significant role in the visual documentation of Lockerly Arboretum. This effort will culminate in a digital archive that highlights the arboretum's diverse plant life, landscapes, and historical elements.
Jamie Downing, Associate Professor of Rhetoric, Department of Communication
"Mapping Sites of Holocaust Memory in Munich, Germany"
In Munich, the birthplace of Nazism, there is no prominent public memorial dedicated to those murdered by the Third Reich. Instead, small plaques, statues, and monuments throughout the city reveal glimpses of the era’s terrors. Further, there is no easily available information about this dispersed network of monuments, save for an outdated, difficult-to-find PDF guide. This project supports efforts to fill this lack.
The Fellowship will support the development of mobile walking tours of these dispersed memorials. Plotting the sites alongside photographs, historical context, and other information, the tour will use resources from my field research conducted in Munich this spring where I met with city and museum officials to gain a better understanding of the factors that shape Munich’s memorial practices and visited five-dozen sites. Many, even the most significant, were difficult to find or lacked explanatory context. I documented each using both traditional and 360-degree cameras and have collected additional information about each site, including links to oral histories, historical photographs, and academic histories.
I will use PocketSights to construct a walking tour of Munich’s dispersed memorial sites. This free platform offers robust features that most other platforms require a monthly subscription to maintain. The app integrates maps, text, videos, audio, links, and other information. App users can use GPS to follow the tour. Moreover, PocketSights publishes tours on the web – allowing access to the tour and associated information from anywhere.
I am also working on creating StoryMaps that capture the histories of under-documented sites. For instance: Mohlestrasse, the center of post-war, displaced Jewish community, has no public memorial. I am collaborating with Sapir von Able (the Jewish Museum’s Curator of Public Education) to create a vibrant StoryMap that introduces visitors to the street’s nuanced history.
Dana Gorzelany-Mostak, Associate Professor of Music, Department of Music
"From Drinking Song to Thinking Song: College Songbooks and the Liberal Arts Tradition"
From ceremonies and rituals to athletic events and other social activities, group singing has long been a part of the college experience at US institutions (Winstead 2013; Blake 2014, 2016). Eager to participate in the joys of collegiate life outside of recitations and lectures, students regularly gathered to sing the popular tunes of the day, folk music, and sometimes amateurish music composed by their own classmates. While some of this music penned by students has persisted in the form of alma maters and fight songs, most of it remains buried in the pages of college songbooks. Much to the delight of this researcher, many students held onto their well-worn songbooks far beyond their college days, therefore, quite a few are available for purchase on eBay.
For this project, I will work with the students in Music History II (Spring 2025) to investigate the song repertoire between the pages of thirty liberal arts college songbooks published between 1880 and 1918. What were the students’ attitudes towards curricular and extracurricular activities at their respective institutions? What values did this music instill in students? How did music work to build community among students and establish institutional identity and culture? Textual and musical analysis of the songbooks’ contents and close study of other archival materials such as school yearbooks, newspapers, magazines, memoirs, letters, and other ephemera will allow our research group to offer nuanced answers to these questions, as well as ponder what a liberal arts education has signified to students both past and present.
The students in Music History II will select the format for their final project: a digital lecture, a podcast, a poster presentation, an essay, or music composition. All students will be encouraged to submit proposals for Research Day. At the end of the semester, all projects will be made available via a website.
2023-24 FELLOWS
Daniel Holcombe, Assistant Professor of Spanish, Department of World Languages & Cultures
"OpenAI (ChatGPT and Dall-E-2) in the Foreign Language Classroom"
University professors are increasingly intimidated by student use of Large Language Model Artificial Intelligence (LLM-AI) in their classrooms. Instead of attempting to dissuade this, instructors can create innovative, teachable moments that are also assessable, informing students that they are aware of LLM-AI capabilities and that they understand that many students are already using them. This presentation explores how OpenAI – ChatGPT and Dall-E-2 – can be actively featured in the undergraduate university classroom. It provides pedagogical models of interpersonal speaking and presentational writing and speaking projects situated in foreign language and literature courses. By focusing on the details of tangible input and output, assessment through rubrics is facilitated, while encouraging the opportunity for active discussion through the comparison of engaging results.
Alesa Liles, Associate Professor of Criminal Justice, Department of Government & Sociology
“Voices of the Returned: Life After Incarceration”
Voices of the Returned: Life After Incarceration,” is a podcast featuring individuals impacted by mass incarceration, many of whom spent decades in prison. Each episode explores the hard-fought journeys to reestablishing and reclaiming their lives. Hearing the lived experiences of these individuals can bring textbook material to life. Students, as co-hosts, producers, writers, and research assistants, see and sometimes meet the person who was personally impacted. With additional funding, Season 2 will feature a variety of justice-impacted individuals and partners.
Jessica Wallace, Associate Professor of History, Department of History & Geography
"'Building Forts in Their Hearts': People and Places of the Anglo-Cherokee War”
This website uses digital tools to tell the story of the Anglo-Cherokee War (1759-1761) and to analyze its social networks and geographic spaces. The war took place in the midst of the Seven Years’ War between Cherokees and the colony of South Carolina; the two groups had been allies through 1758 when tensions over land encroachments, broken treaty terms, and intermittent violence boiled over into outright conflict. Instead of rehashing the causes of the war (work that I and others have done elsewhere), this project will focus on key places and people who were crucial to the outbreak, progression, and resolution of the war, in order to better understand the intertwined relationships that drove the Anglo-Cherokee alliance and fostered its temporary breakdown.
2022-23 FELLOWS
Ruben Yepes Muñoz
Assistant Professor of Art History
Department of Art
"Art and Covid-19 Crisis in Latin America"
This ongoing research seeks to document and analyze the artwork and art exhibitions produced in response to the Covid-19 pandemic across Latin America and to the social crisis that the pandemic exacerbated in countries such as Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador and Mexico. The main means of dissemination of the research results will be an interactive website that will include images, texts and links to artist, gallery and museum websites, as well as to my own scholarly articles on the artwork and exhibitions.
Craig Pascoe
Professor of History
Department of History and Geography
James Hill "Trae" Welborn, III
Associate Professor of History
Department of History and Geography
“Keepers of the Flame Fan the Flames of Change: A Digital Oral History Project on Georgia Women in Barbecue”
The Digital Humanities Grant is providing funding support for a mini-documentary that focuses on two women pitmasters/bbq restaurant owners in Georgia—Jenica Gilmore of Vanna BBQ in Vanna and Tammy Woodard of Smokey’s BBQ in Pooler. Other documentaries are planned for South Carolina, North Carolina, and Alabama.
This is the first in a planned series of four 12-15 mini-documentaries about the role and importance of women in the region’s barbecue traditions both in the past and the present. Our focus in this series will be on women pitmasters and restaurant owners operating in a ‘traditionally male dominated’ profession who have overcome adversity and a wall of “tradition” that blocked their entrance into the business of barbecue. We also examine women’s efforts to keep their businesses afloat during COVID, barbecue as an entrepreneurial opportunity for women who do not have the financial means to open a large business, maintaining a culinary tradition in the region, and acceptance by the local community.
If there is one constant in the ever-evolving world of barbecue in the American South, it’s that barbecue defies simple definition or classification. The proverbial lines in the sand abound in various efforts to define and classify this thing called barbecue, from the type of meat typically cooked to who is doing the cooking. All have engendered contentious boundary lines around defining characteristics that are deeply held and fervently defended, even as they prove imminently protean and ephemeral. Regions and nations, ethnicities and cultures, across the country and around the globe, lay claim to such barbecue “traditions” in all their inherent variety.
In the American South early and persistent claims to “authenticity” in the region’s barbecue culture have tended to defy this inherent diversity and variety by imposing monolithic “standards” to which barbecue pitmasters either conformed or risked ostracization. Like other forms of cultural expression, barbecue “purists” constructed arbitrary walls around the cause of authenticity almost wholly out of alignment with historical patterns of cultural development. The American South embodies these trends when focusing on issues of gender and race in producing, consuming, and assigning cultural meaning to barbecue.
Despite abounding historical evidence to the contrary, the prevailing popular image of the southern barbecue pitmaster has been white and male. But the historical record and present practice both refute such prejudicial presumptions and perspectives, with Black Southerners and Southern Women consistently occupying an essential, if marginalized, place around the pit and at the table in the region’s barbecue culture and history. Foodways historians like Adrian Miller, John T. Edge, and Jessica Harris have pointed out that African Americans and women have been largely ignored when telling the story of barbecue. This project is an effort to highlight the role of women pitmasters in the American South through the story of women pitmasters who are carrying on the tradition today.