People
Bridging Departments and Disciplines in a Digital Age

Co-Directors

Pamella Lach
DH Librarian

Dr. Pamella Lach is the Digital Humanities Librarian at San Diego State University. Pam’s work explores how new and emerging technologies transform humanistic scholarship and pedagogy. Her areas of interest include data visualization, information retrieval, user experience design, and digital pedagogy. She is currently studying how folksonomy, or user-generated social tagging, can enhance and disrupt traditional authority-driven classification schemas. Pam is the Director of the Digital Humanities Center in the SDSU Library.

Sureshi M. Jayawardene
Africana Studies

Sureshi Jayawardene is associate professor of Africana Studies. She received her Ph.D. in African American Studies from Northwestern University. She is an Africana social scientist specializing in the western Indian Ocean African diaspora. Her research and teaching interests include Africana geographies and epistemologies, diaspora, memory, expressive cultures, spirituality, Africana families and kinship formations, Black digital humanities, and research methods. She is currently working on a book combining ethnography, interviews, archival research, and content analyses with theories of diaspora, Pan-Africanism, Black Geographies, and Africana aesthetics to culturally situate her investigation into conceptions of selfhood and community among people of African descent in Sri Lanka. Her publications about South Asian Africana communities have appeared in the Journal of Black Studies and the Journal of African American Studies. Jayawardene is also a co-founder and currently co-directs the Afrometrics Research Institute.

Founders

Joanna Brooks
English and Comparative Literature

Dr. Joanna Brooks is the Associate Vice President of Faculty Affairs and a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at San Diego State University. She is a national voice on religion and American life and the author or editor of six books on race, gender, colonialism, and religion in American literature and culture. Her recent books include The Book of Mormon Girl: A Memoir of An American Faith (Simon & Schuster, 2012), winner of the 2012 award in memoir from the Association of Mormon Letters, Transatlantic Feminisms in the Age of Revolutions (Oxford UP, 2012), and Why We Left: Untold Songs and Stories of America's First Immigrants (University of Minnesota, 2013). Her scholarship has been supported and honored with awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Association, and the Modern Language Association. She has appeared as a commentator or guest on NPR, MSNBC, and the Daily Show, and her writing has also appeared in the Washington Post, Huffington Post, Tablet, Salon, and ReligionDispatches.org. See more at joannabrooks.org.

Jessica Pressman
English and Comparative Literature

Dr. Jessica Pressman is a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at San Diego State University. She is the author of Bookishness: Loving Books in a Digital Age (Columbia UP, 2020) and Digital Modernism: Making It New in New Media (Oxford UP, 2014), co-author, with Mark C. Marino and Jeremy Douglass, of Reading Project: A Collaborative Analysis of William Poundstone’s Project for Tachistocope {Bottomless Pit} (Iowa UP, 2015), and co-editor, with N. Katherine Hayles, of Comparative Textual Media: Transforming the Humanities in a Postprint Era (Minnesota UP, 2013). She is a recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). Her full CV can be found at www.jessicapressman.com.

Advisory Board

Directors and Founder plus:

Affiliate Faculty

Staff

Brent Ameneyro
DH E-lit Programs Assistant

Brent Ameneyro is an MFA poetry student in his final semester. During his time at SDSU, he has been the recipient of the following awards: 2019 Sarah B. Marsh Rebelo Excellence in Poetry Scholarship, 2020 San Miguel Poetry Week Fellowship, 2020 Master’s Research Scholarship, and the 2021 SRS Research Award for Diversity, Inclusion and Social Justice. He will be working with the Digital Humanities team to strengthen the support of experimentation in poetry through Electronic Literature on campus and within the community. Visit Brent at BrentAmeneyro.com.

Harmit Chima
DH Programs Assistant

My first experience with Digital Humanities was in Dr. Jessica Pressman’s ENG 560: “Digital Literature” class (Spring 2020), where I created a digital final project that exposed me to the healing powers of digital humanities during a pandemic. I graduated with a major in Statistics from San Diego State University in 2020. I am now starting my MS in Big Data Analytics and plan to accentuate GIS through the digital humanities realm. I'm excited to be part of the DH@SDSU team!

If you are interested in joining our Affiliate Faculty, please email us! digitalhumanities@sdsu.edu.

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