Please join us for a panel on cutting-edge scholarship in the emerging field of the Digital Black Atlantic, featuring:

• Annette Joseph-Gabriel, Associate Professor of Romance Studies, Duke University

• Kelly Baker Josephs, Professor of English, City University of New York

• Kelsey Moore, doctoral candidate in History, Johns Hopkins University

• Roopika Risam, Associate Professor of Secondary and Higher Education and English, Salem State University

This event is free and open to the public, but registration is required. RSVP here.

The event will be moderated by Nicole Aljoe, Professor of English and Africana Studies, and Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, Distinguished Professor of English; Co-Director, NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks.

Panelists will speak on a range of important projects and topics related to the digital Black Atlantic:

• Annette Joseph-Gabriel will share Mapping Marronage,  a digital visualization of enslaved people’s mobility in the Atlantic world. Professor Joseph-Gabriel will present an overview of the site and its visualization of enslaved people’s flight and networks. She will discuss the process of transcription, translation, and data mining applied to the digital map’s primary documents sourced from archives around the world. Professor Joseph-Gabriel will share her work asynchronously, via a recorded presentation. 
• Roopika Risam will discuss areas of growth and reflect on the limitations of The Digital Black Atlantic and connect the work of the volume to her current work with the Digital Ethnic Futures Consortium.
• Kelly Baker Josephs will discuss the theoretical framework for, and challenges encountered in publishing the edited volume, The Digital Black Atlantic. She will close with brief connections between the volume and her current work.
• Kelsey Moore will speak on her experience with the Mardi Gras Indian Traditions project and broadly discuss her digital praxis around researching, archiving, and documenting The Black South.

After each panelist speaks about their current research in the digital Black Atlantic, we will have an open discussion with all attendees. 

Speaker biographies

Kelly Baker Josephs

Kelly Baker Josephs is Professor of English at York College, CUNY and Professor of English and Digital Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the author of Disturbers of the Peace: Representations of Insanity in Anglophone Caribbean Lit­erature (2013), co-editor of The Digital Black Atlantic (University of Minnesota Press, 2021), and co-organizer of the annual Caribbean Digital conferences. She is currently at work on a second monograph that explores the intersections between new technologies and Caribbean cultural production.

Annette Joseph-Gabriel

Annette Joseph-Gabriel is an Associate Professor of Romance Studies at Duke University. Her research focuses on race, gender, and citizenship in the French-speaking Caribbean, Africa, and France. She is the author of Reimagining Liberation: How Black Women Transformed Citizenship in the French Empire (University of Illinois Press), winner of the 2020 MLA Prize for a First Book. She has published articles in peer-reviewed journals including Small Axe, Slavery & Abolition, Eighteenth-Century Studies and The French Review, and her public writings have been featured in Al Jazeera, HuffPost, and the Washington Post. She is a recipient of the Carrie Chapman Catt Prize for Research on Women and Politics. She is also the managing editor of Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International and production editor of Women in French Studies.

Kelsey Moore

Kelsey Moore (she/her) is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History at the Johns Hopkins University, focusing on southern African American History. She is also the Lead Chair of the Mardi Gras Indian Traditions: Going Global, Going Online under LifexCode: Digital Humanities Against Enclosure. She received a Dual BA in Africana Studies and Public Policy from New York University, where she graduated as the 2019 Valedictorian of the College of Arts and Science. Her current dissertation tentatively titled “What the Dead Witnessed: Clearing of Black Knowledges in Jim Crow South Carolina,” focuses on the removal and flooding of over 9,000 graves which was required of the Santee-Cooper Hydroelectric Project in the 1930s. In addition to her dissertation, Moore created thefolk in 2020, a digital archive dedicated to highlighting black southern culture both past and present. Her digital praxis centers on preserving and rethinking The Black South as an essential landscape of black knowledges. 

Roopika Risam

Roopika Risam is Chair of Secondary and Higher Education and Associate Professor of Education and English at Salem State University. She is the author of New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy, and the director of the Mellon-funded Digital Ethnic Futures Consortium, a network of scholars teaching at the intersections of digital humanities and ethnic studies.