Meet - CLIR Postdoctoral Fellowship Program (original) (raw)

Meet the Fellows

Current Fellows

Alumni

Current Postdoctoral Fellows by Cohort

2022 Fellows

Jason M. Chernesky

Jason M. Chernesky (Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine) earned his PhD in the History and Sociology of Science from the University of Pennsylvania. Chernesky is a historian of twentieth-century medicine, healthcare, public health, and environments in the United States. His research examines race-based health disparities among American children and their families in the context of the built environments in which they lived. His research interests also include histories of epidemic disease, drug use, biomedical technologies, and nursing. As the CLIR Opioid Industry Research Postdoctoral Fellow, Chernesky will be involved in the stewardship of public access and research into this growing digital archive co-curated by Johns Hopkins and UCSF.

Rachel Corbman

Rachel Corbman (University of Toronto) is a postdoctoral fellow in community data at the University of Toronto, where she will participate in the intellectual life of the Critical Digital Humanities Initiative and teach in the iSchool. She received her PhD in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Stony Brook University in 2019. Her current project, “Conferencing on the Edge: A Queer History of Feminist Field Formation, 1969-1989,” is a history of the conflicts that shaped women’s studies and gay and lesbian studies in the 1970s and 1980s.

Taiwo Lasisi

Taiwo Lasisi (Carnegie Mellon University) received her PhD in Public Administration and Policy from Old Dominion University. As a CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow in Community Data Literacy at Carnegie Mellon University, her research called The “DaPGEF” Project focuses on exploring the use of “data visualization to assess the problematics of greenhouse emissions and flooding”, particularly in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She works with the Carnegie Mellon University Libraries, Sustainability Initiatives, and Center for Shared Prosperity to promote data literacy, management, and research on the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and environmental justice issues.

Katie Mackinnon

Katie Mackinnon (University of Toronto) received her PhD in the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto in 2022. Her research focuses on histories of the web, including early uses and experiences of young people in the late 1990s. She interrogates ethical approaches to web archival research and youth data, and examines social, infrastructural, and policy issues of the web.

Heidi Nicholls

Heidi Nicholls (Johns Hopkins University) is a historical and political sociologist of empire, settler colonialism, and race. Nicholls completed a PhD at the University of Virginia. Her dissertation research analyzed how settler colonists employed notions of whiteness to maintain and extend the U.S. empire on the continent and across Oceania. As a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow with the Department of Sociology, Nicholls will work on projects directed by Black Beyond Data, including the risk and racism initiative, which focuses on the interconnections between colonization, racism, and the history of medicine.

Erin Yunes

Erin Yunes (Virginia Tech) is a CLIR post-doctoral fellow for the Rematriating Inuit Knowledges team. Dr. Yunes received her PhD at York University in Toronto, ON, Canada. Her doctoral work, titled Decolonizing Nunavut’s Art Market, explored how decolonizing and Indigenizing information and communication technologies in the Canadian Arctic strengthens Inuit engagement in rewriting a persistent colonial narrative of Arctic history and allows communities to control the dissemination of stories and traditional knowledge. Community ownership and control of broadband infrastructure and establishing equitable, affordable, and accessible ICT innovation reinforced by community-first strategic development policies support expansion in the Inuit art market in Nunavut.

2020 Fellows

Portia D. Hopkins

Portia D. Hopkins (Rice University) holds a doctorate in American Studies from the University of Maryland, College Park. As the CLIR/DLF Postdoctoral Research Associate in Data Curation for African American Studies at Rice University she will teach workshops, conduct outreach about data curation to African American activist groups in Houston, assess and inventory local data collections and develop best practices documents on curating data. She will also participate and consult in the data curation, digital humanities, and African American studies communities at Rice and across Houston.

Petrouchka Moïse

Petrouchka Moïse (Grinnell College) received her Doctorate of Design in Cultural Preservation from the Louisiana State University College of Art and Design. As a Postdoctoral Fellow in Data Curation for Haitian Visual Arts, she will work jointly with Grinnell College Libraries staff and the Waterloo Cultural Center. Dr. Moïse will play a central role in coordinating the work of the Haitian Art: A Digital Crossroads project (HADC). The HADC aims to make the Haitian art collection of the Waterloo Center for the Arts, the largest publicly held collection of Haitian art in the world, digitally accessible as a preparatory study for the creation of a digital hub for a network of online resources in Haitian and Caribbean studies. In addition to managing this project, she will collaborate with cultural and academic institutes within Haiti and the Diaspora to build awareness of this collection.

Synatra Smith

Synatra Smith (Philadelphia Museum of Art) is a cultural anthropologist exploring extended reality (XR) and other digital tools to enhance special collections and archival records featuring African American art, history, and culture with the specific intention of documenting workflows that can be shared with students, cultural heritage workers, and scholars interested in building digital projects without relying on a large budget or team. She sits at the intersection of researcher; gallery, library, archives, and museum (GLAM) professional; and digital humanities practitioner. Storytelling and narrative-building are central to that experience and her goal is to identify ways to engage target user communities throughout the life of these projects through more inclusive means that integrate feedback loops and myriad learning styles.

Francena Turner

Francena Turner (Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities) received her Ph.D. in Education Policy, Organization, and Leadership with a concentration in History of Education from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. As Postdoctoral Associate for Data Curation in African American History and Culture for the University of Maryland Restorative Justice Project, she will work jointly with the African American History, Culture, and Digital Humanities (AADHum) and University of Maryland Libraries faculty to design an oral history project, conduct and preserve oral history interviews, and participate in planning, designing, and implementing the project’s data management and curation strategies.

Alumni by Cohort

Enter short code for 2020 cohort

Fellows in Canada & Overseas

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