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.

Angel David Nieves
History

Dr. Angel David Nieves is Professor of History & Digital Humanities in the Department of History in the College of Arts and Letters (CAL) at San Diego State University whose scholarship focuses on the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and technology in the U.S. and South Africa. He is the author and co-editor of two historical monographs, including “An Architecture of Education: African American Women Design the New South” (U Rochester, 2018) and “’We Shall Independent Be:’ African American Place Making and the Struggle to Claim Space in the U.S.” (w/Alexander) (UPColorado, 2008), plus a range of cutting-edge digital history publications and experimental online platforms. Among these are “Soweto’76 3D,” comprising digital archive and virtual reality research into politically fraught sites such as the Nelson Mandela House in Soweto, Johannesburg. Nieves has received support for his work from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and while Co-Director of the Digital Humanities Initiative (2009-2017) at Hamilton College he helped raise over $2.7 million dollars in research support for digital scholarship. He was Presidential Visiting Associate Professor in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) and the DHLab at Yale University (2017-2018).

Today, Dr. Nieves is an award-winning teacher and mentor who leads courses in digital history, spatial humanities, urban history and the histories of race, gender, sexuality and space in the U.S. and the global South, including South Africa. He recently served as an editor on a special issue of American Quarterly (The Journal of the American Studies Association, Fall 2018) entitled, “Towards a Critically Engaged Digital Practice: American Studies and the Digital Humanities” and is co-editor (w/Senier & McGrail) of a forthcoming volume in the Debates in the Digital Humanities Series (UMinnesota Press), Institutions, Infrastructures at the Interstices (expected 2020). His present work comprises a series of digital collaborations as well as a digital book project entitled, Apartheid Heritages: A Spatial History of South Africa’s Townships.

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 an Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at San Diego State University. She is the author of 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.

Core Faculty

Noah Arceneaux
Journalism and Media Studies

Dr. Noah Arceneaux is an Associate Professor in the School of Journalism and Media Studies and serves as the Coordinator of the Media Studies Program. Arceneaux is a media historian with an interest in the emergence of new technologies, ranging from wireless telegraphy to current forms of mobile media.

David P. Cline
History

Dr. David P. Cline is an Associate Professor of History and the Digital Humanities, specializes in 20th and 21st century U.S. social movements, religion, oral history, the digital humanities, and public history. David has recently worked on digital and public humanities projects with the Smithsonian, the Library of Congress, and National Geographic, and his public and digital history projects often use augmented reality, oral history, and other sources to aid in the teaching of historical inquiry. David's most recent book is From Reconciliation to Revolution (UNC Press, 2016).

Gabriel Doyle
Linguistics

Dr. Gabriel Doyle is a computational psycholinguist who wants to understand why we talk the way we do. His research combines mathematical models of language with emerging big data sources, such as Twitter conversations and e-mail databases, developing new approaches for understanding how we structure our speech and writing. He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics & Asian/Middle Eastern Languages.

Pam Jackson
Library

Pamela Jackson is the Popular Culture Librarian. She studies the impact of digital technology on diverse communities of library users, and her subject-based research focuses on the exploration of culture as reflected in comic art. Pamela holds an M.A. in English with an emphasis in Creative Writing from Sonoma State University and an M.A. in Library and Information Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

William Nericcio
English and Comparative Literature

Dr. William Nericcio is The Director of MALAS, the Master of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences program, and a professor of English and Comparative Literature & Chicana/o Studies. William tracks the metamorphosis of stereotypes as they evolve from analog to digital devises—a literary critic and film theorist, he is increasingly interested in the evolution of narrative in the age of the smartphone.

Nathian Rodriguez
Journalism and Media Studies

Dr. Nathian Shae Rodriguez is an Assistant Professor in the School of Journalism & Media Studies. His research primarily focuses on minority identity and representation in media, specifically LGBTQ and Latinx populations. He also researches pop culture, identification, radio broadcasting, and issues of masculinity/mascing.

Sweta Sarkar
Electrical and Computer Engineering

Dr. Sarkar is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Her research focuses on design, analysis and evaluation of network protocols and architecture for wireless applications like embedded biosensors, IoT and the smart grid. She has received several awards from the National Science Foundation (NSF). She currently serves as Education Co-Director of the Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering (CSNE) - a NSF funded Engineering Research Center.

Digital Humanities and Classics Postdoc

Dr. Danielle Smotherman Bennett
Classics and Humanities

Dr. Bennett's research focuses on multiple aspects of the ancient world, including Greek vase-painting and Greek archaeology, trade in the ancient Mediterranean, and digital approaches to the study of the ancient world. Within the digital humanities, Dr. Bennett is involved in the use of Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI), photogrammetry, and x-ray diffraction (XRD) on the study of ancient objects. Much of her research examines the role of women in the ancient world and an interdisciplinary approach to ancient objects. Learn more about Dr. Bennett and the Postdoctoral Fellowship.