DH@SDSU Seeks a New CAL Faculty Co-Director

The Digital Humanities Initiative (DH@SDSU) invites applications for our next CAL Faculty Co-Director for a two-year, potentially renewable term starting Fall 2026.

The College of Arts and Letters, as the founding college for the initiative in partnership with the Library, houses the DH@SDSU budget and provides assigned time to the faculty member serving as Co-Director. The Co-Director position is thus limited to faculty members in CAL.

CAL Co-Director Position Description

The CAL Co-Director works in coordination, collaboration, and consultation with DH@SDSU Co-Director Dr. Pam Lach (DH Librarian/DH Center Director) and other DH team members to:

Programming & Curriculum

• Organize DH@SDSU programming, especially that which is research and creative focused (guest lectures, faculty research group, art installations and exhibits, etc.) based upon constraints and affordances of the DHC.
• Reboot the faculty research group/reading circle and faculty lighting talks.
• Develop and pilot a signature program aligned with DH@SDSU core values.
• Oversee curriculum development, including exploration of the creation of a major, minor, certificate, and/or graduate program in digital humanities, broadly construed.

Community

• Engage and reinvigorate the DH Advisory Board via regular meetings (~1/semester) and communications. Expand our community of Affiliate Faculty.
• Engage with and nurture our growing cross-campus community, including contributing to a welcoming community in the DH Center and fostering faculty relationships across campus and with off-campus partners.
• Hire and supervise the DH programs assistant, a CAL graduate student who works ~10 hours/week supporting DH@SDSU communications. The programs assistant develops, designs, and creates flyers for DH events; oversees social media communications; creates and distributes regular newsletters; helps maintain the DH@SDSU website; assists in event planning, etc.
• Oversee PR and public-facing communications, including website, social media, event flyers, blog and newsletters with help of DH graduate assistant.

Budget & Assessment

• Serve as a sound steward of the DH budget, including maintaining budget documents, tracking expenses, and ensuring appropriate uses of funds.
• Specifically and in consultation with Co-Director Lach and Advisory Board, determine usage of the CAL-sponsored budget for the academic year. Decisions about the spending of allocated funds for a given year will be made in a transparent and consistent manner. DH funds may be used for events, speaker honoraria, and supporting faculty through seed-funding initiatives. The CAL Co-Director is responsible for all budget reporting (quarterly and annually), both within CAL and among the DH community.
• Work with Pam Lach, and CAL and Library development staff, to develop fundraising initiatives and grant applications that align with our shared values. Work with the CAL Development Office to identify fundraising opportunities.
• Assess the growth and impact of DH@SDSU, in collaboration with Co-Director Lach.

The CAL DH Co-Director will:

• Receive one course buyout during each semester of service. The buyout must be used during the semester it is earned.
• Participate in CAL Chairs and Directors and Chairs and Directors Only Group (CDOG) meetings (each traditionally meets monthly on Thursday mornings).
• Develop a work plan for their co-directorship, including annual goals, intermediate benchmarks, and assessment methods. This plan will be developed in coordination with Co-Director Lach and then finalized and approved by the CAL Dean’s Office at the point of hire.
• Follow CAL policies and procedures for evaluating Chairs and Directors, including annual meetings with the CAL Dean’s Office to assess progress made on the work plan and making adjustments to the milestones and deliverables as needed. 

Eligibility:

• Primary faculty appointment must be in a CAL department or program. 
• All CAL faculty may apply, including tenure-track and contingent faculty/lecturers. 
• Candidates should possess leadership experience and demonstrate their capacity to take on this work. 

About The Digital Humanities Initiative 

“Digital Humanities” describes efforts to study digital technologies and culture, employ computational practices in research and teaching, and reflect upon the impact of the digital. The Digital Humanities Initiative at SDSU (“DH@SDSU”) promotes such critical engagement by providing a hub for innovation and collaboration across campus.

Study of the digital compels innovation in research methods and perspectives as well as the forging of new partnerships conducting this work. Digital technologies create new ways of seeing, knowing, and communicating; new modes of distributing resources, ideas, and information; and new interfaces for interaction among diverse human communities.

The Digital Humanities Initiative at SDSU generates humanistic critical research about the digital shift with a specific focus on diversity, aligned with our institutional commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Given our legacy as an institution serving a diverse student body and our location on an international border, we’re obliged and empowered to ask and answer essential questions about how technological change intersects with global diversity. We seek to interrogate, expose, and address inequities and unintended harms wrought by technology, particular in our current “Age of AI.” We take a critical and ethical approach to digital technologies, foster critical digital literacies in our classrooms, and consider the visible and hidden costs of tool adoption. In short, our DH Initiative was designed for our specific institutional context—an HSI and AANAPISI university within the California State University that centers questions of global diversity in our work.[1] 

Moreover, our DH Initiative is organized around a set of shared values that center humans, and human relationships, in the digital age. Our community is collaborative and collective, grass-roots and faculty-run. We attend to processes and privilege care—for ourselves and each other—above any specific project, tool, or funding opportunity. We seek to engage in ethical and transparent labor practices. As a result, our initiative operates responsively to our community’s needs, shifting resources where they are most needed and following the interests of the people who show up. Threaded throughout these shifts is a commitment to critical, ethical, and humane DH praxis.[2] Learn more about the history of the Initiative.

DH@SDSU Signature Programs & Strategic Vision

Our DH Initiative is poised to become a leader in ethical, equitable DH praxis. As our program continues to mature, we garner regional, national, and international attention. Likewise, our DH Center in SDSU Library is held up as a model of a user- and values-driven DH space. The unique partnership between the colleges, particularly CAL, and the Library is a critical, and noteworthy, component of our hard-earned success. We continue building on this foundation both on campus and beyond.

DH@SDSU’s work is organized around several signature programs, each of which aligns with our core values of critical digital engagement and global diversity:

• Electronic Literature, run by former Co-Founder and Co-Director Jessica Pressman
• Digital Ethnic Studies, run by outgoing Co-Director Sureshi Jayawardene
• Podcasting/Digital Storytelling, run by Co-Director and DH Librarian/DH Center Director Pam Lach and DH Center Programs & Operations Specialist Patrick Flanigan
• Annual DH Showcase, run by Co-Director and DH Librarian/DH Center Director Pam Lach

DH@SDSU’s vision is largely shaped by our community. As new faculty, staff, and students flow through the initiative, they bring their unique interests. Rather than articulate a rigid strategic vision, we follow the direction of our people, always with an eye towards SDSU’s Strategic Plan. Initiative co-directors are responsible for developing signature programs, born out of their own interests and passions, to pilot during their term. Future initiative funds may be allocated for that program after the co-director’s term, depending on capacity and funding availability. In this way, we continually grow and transform.

Signature programs take many forms, including curricular innovations, public programs, and faculty training initiatives (workshops and seed grants). DH Center space may be requested for sustaining the program, depending on the needs of the program and the availability of space.

DH Community & Networks

DH@SDSU includes an Advisory Board and Affiliate Faculty from across the disciplines. 

Advisory Board members help shape the strategic vision and direction for the initiative. They:

• Attend regular meetings, called by the Co-Directors
• Provide strategic feedback and guidance to DH@SDSU leadership
• Serve as liaisons between DH@SDSU and the larger campus community, helping to distribute information about events and programs
• Act as ambassadors and advocates for DH and digital scholarship in home departments and colleges/schools
• Provide advisory support for curriculum development

Advisory Board members typically serve two-year, renewable terms.

Affiliate Faculty members:

• Serve as DH ambassadors to home unit and build collaborative partnerships to expand our programming and curriculum
• Provide first tier feedback, along with or after Advisory Board, for determining shape of DH@SDSU
• Promote DH@SDSU programs and events
• Participate in DH@SDSU events and encourage students to attend/participate 

Additionally, members of DH@SDSU play crucial roles in the emerging CSU-wide Digital Humanities Consortium. DH Librarian, DH Center Director, and DH@SDSU Co-Director Pam Lach co-organized the first cross-institutional DH event, “Networked Connections: Explorations Across Digital Humanities,” a two-day gathering of DH practitioners in October 2022. DH faculty from across the CSU began meeting informally, leading to pursuing a Mellon-funded Digital Humanities Capacity Building Fellowship through the Digital Ethnic Futures (DEFCon) program. The DH@CSU Consortium was formed with the goal of fostering a system-wide collaboration of resources and expertise in the many disciplines that contribute to the field. Building on the history of Ethnic Studies at the California State University (CSU) system, the DH@CSU works to promote student, faculty, and staff use of digital tools and technologies to center the lived experiences of historically marginalized groups, rethink historical questions and contemporary problems, and create ethical digital futures. While DH@CSU has experienced growing pains common to new consortia, efforts to nurture the community persist, particularly among CSU librarians.

DH in/across the Curriculum

A DH education is both practical and about praxis, as it teaches critical digital literacy and skills relevant to the digital economy. Faculty across the disciplines experiment with digital interventions in the classroom—from mapping and podcasting to digital storytelling and critical engagement with AI. Many faculty teach semester-long, thoroughly scaffolded DH projects—typically in partnership with the DH Center—while others incorporate a DH-related module or assignment. As such, DH in the curriculum takes on many forms of critical digital inquiry.

While our community pursued creating a formal DH minor and certificate in the past, those efforts were left unfulfilled due to the pandemic. The incoming Co-Director will be expected to explore the possibilities for creating a formal program of study, whether a major, minor, certificate, and/or graduate program. 

The DH Center

The Digital Humanities Center (DHC), located in SDSU Library, is the hub for our DH Initiative. Designed to reflect the values of DH@SDSU, the DHC supports just, ethical, and anti-oppressive research, teaching, and learning that values the importance of the humanities, and the interactions of humans in real time and space, in the digital age. Nearly all DH@SDSU events/activities flow through the DHC (though not every activity that happens in the space is formally affiliated with DH@SDSU). Scheduling priority is given to DH@SDSU activities. The DHC’s budget is separate from the Initiative, allocated from the Library’s budget. 

The DHC is a leader in scholarly podcasting and digital storytelling, boasting five podcasting studios, a podcast publishing platform, and hands-on support throughout the full podcasting lifecycle. The DHC also supports the Omeka S digital exhibit platform, offers consultation, training, and instruction in ArcGIS StoryMaps, and a range of other tools and resources.

DH@SDSU Co-Director Dr. Pam Lach is the DH Librarian and serves as the DH Center Director. She oversees the strategic growth of the DH Center, pushing it in new directions to meet the emerging needs of the DH community. Much of her work focuses on developing DH programming, services and resources; partnering with faculty in their digital pedagogy; and consulting on DH research and projects.

As DH@SDSU Co-Director, she serves as the bridge between the physical space and the broader Initiative. She works with the CAL Co-Director to:

• Set the strategic direction of DH@SDSU (parallel to the DH Center)
• Ensure that our research, teaching, and programs maintain a clear commitment to social activism and global diversity (rooted in the original Area of Excellence) 
• Collaborate with the Co-Director in grant and fundraising strategies and pursuits, as well as in efforts to grow the reach of DH@SDSU across San Diego, SoCal, and the CSU, etc.
• Collaborate with the CAL Co-Director to assess the growth and impact of DH@SDSU
• Represent DH@SDSU and the DHC to the library, campus, the region, nationally, and internationally.

Leadership Model

DH@SDSU was co-founded by Joanna Brooks and Jessica Pressman in 2014, who shared joint directorship in its early years. Pressman then became sole Director and participated in hiring faculty under the Area of Excellence funding model. Dr. Pam Lach  was hired in 2016 under this funding model and strategic plan in order to take on a leadership role in DH@SDSU. Pressman and Lach shared co-directing responsibilities until 2019, when Dr. Angel David Nieves took over Pressman’s role; Lach and Nieves co-directed DH@SDSU for AY 2019-2020. In Summer 2020 (during the Covid pandemic) Pressman stepped back into the co-director role to assist Lach in leading DH@SDSU through times of crisis. 

Starting in AY2022-2023, we moved to a rotating co-directorship model, with CAL faculty applying for two-year renewable terms. A rotating leadership model allows our initiative to explore new directions, following the interests of each co-director. Dr. Lach serves as the long-term Co-Director to provide stability and institutional memory. Dr. Sureshi Jayawardene (Africana Studies) serves as the Co-Director from 2022-2026. The incoming Co-Director will serve an initial two-year term beginning in Fall 2026.

Application Materials

Candidates should prepare the following materials:

1. Personal statement/vision for DH@SDSU, including a brief description of the proposed signature program (up to 500 words).
2. Preliminary work plan for the initial two-year appointment, including goals, benchmarks, and anticipated assessment methods. This work plan will be finalized in consultation with the CAL Dean’s Office at the point of hire. 
3. Explanation of your previous participation in/relationship to DH@SDSU.
4. CV highlighting DH-related activities, research, teaching, etc. as well as leadership roles, fundraising experience, event organizing, etc.
5. Brief acknowledgement that the department chair/director knows the person is applying and supports the application.

Applications should be emailed to Pam Lach ([email protected]) by Friday, January 30, 2026 at 5pm. 

References

[1] Pamella R. Lach and Jessica Pressman, “Digital Infrastructures: People, Place, and Passion, a Case Study of SDSU,” in People, Practice, Power: Digital Humanities Outside the Center, eds. Anne McGrail, Angel David Nieves, and Siobhan Senier. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021, pp 189-201. 

[2] Pamella R. Lach, “Centering our Values: A Framework for Digital Humanities in the Library,” in Digital Humanities in the Library: Challenges and Opportunities for Subject Specialists, Revised Second Edition, eds. Arianne Hartsell-Gundy, Laura Braunstein, Liorah Golomb. Association of College and Research Libraries, 2024, pp 43-68. https://doi.org/10.17613/t8eh-p365