DH@CSU Receives DEFCon Award

The Digital Humanities at California State University (DH@CSU) Consortium has received a 2023 Digital Ethnic Futures Consortium (DEFCon) award, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, to build institutional capacity at the intersection of Digital Humanities and Ethnic Studies lead by Katherine D. Harris as Project Investigator (SJSU) and Jamila Moore Pewu as Co-PI of the national DEFCon initiative (CSU Fullerton). 

The DH@CSU Consortium was formed by faculty across the CSU who have research and teaching interests in Digital Humanities, with the goal of fostering a system-wide collaboration of resources and expertise. It currently has members from seventeen of the twenty-three CSU campuses. In October 2022, DH@CSU Consortium members in the San Diego State University Library’s Digital Humanities Center and San José State University King Library’s Digital Humanities Center hosted the “Networked Connections: Explorations Across Digital Humanities,” which was part of the CUNY Digital Humanities Research Institute. 

The DEFCon award represents the next step forward for DH@CSU members. With the commencement of the Ethnic Studies requirement in the General Education program, the DH@CSU Consortium is focusing on building a purposeful collaboration between Digital Humanities and Ethnic Studies. The Consortium is hopeful that Ethnic Studies’s embracing of community engagement and focus on underrepresented voices can be augmented and enhanced by the methodologies and approaches of Digital Humanities. The DEFCon award is an opportunity to explore this intersection, as it will allow the Consortium to expand membership by identifying additional Ethnic Studies faculty with interest in the Digital Humanities and create a network to connect them across disparate campuses. 

As part of the grant’s activities, DH@CSU Consortium members will develop strategies for sharing infrastructure and resources, such as a virtual software lab, and will be able to access mentorship networks through the Digital Ethnic Futures Lab as part of Dartmouth’s Digital Humanities and Social Engagement Cluster. With the DEFCon award and additional mentorship, the DH@CSU Consortium will explore how to support resource-intensive Digital Humanities research projects and cultivate innovative teaching methods to imagine new approaches, courses, and programs in the CSU system. 

Currently, DH@CSU Consortium members include: 

• Armondo Collins, Assistant Professor of Composition, Rhetoric, and Literature, Department of English & Modern Languages, College of Letters, Arts and Social Sciences, Cal Poly Pomona 
• Rob Lewis, Associate Professor of History, College of Letters, Arts and Social Sciences, Cal Poly Pomona 
• Kate Ozment, Assistant Professor of English, Department of English & Modern Languages, College of Letters, Arts and Social Sciences, Cal Poly Pomona 
• Kristin Prins, Associate Professor of Composition and Rhetoric, Department of English & Modern Languages, Colleges of Letters, Arts & Social Sciences, Cal Poly Pomona 
• Isaac Schankler, Assistant Professor of Music, College of Letters, Arts and Social Sciences, Cal Poly Pomona 
• Theresa Avila, Curator of the Art Program, School of Arts and Sciences, CSU Channel Islands 
• Annemarie Perez, Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies, College of Arts and Humanities, CSU Dominguez Hills 
• Colleen Greene, Digital Literacy Librarian, Pollak Library, CSU Fullerton 
• Jamila Moore Pewu, CSUF DEFCon Director, and Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities and New Media in History, CSU Fullerton 
• Scott Kleinman, Director, Center for the Digital Humanities,CSU Northridge 
• Danielle Spratt, Associate Professor of English, College of Humanities, CSU Northridge 
• Christina Acosta, Lecturer of Ethnic Studies, College of the Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences, CSU Stanislaus 
• Sureshi M. Jayawardene, Associate Professor of Africana Studies, College of Arts and Letters, San Diego State 
• Pamella Lach, Digital Humanities Librarian, DH Center Director, DH Initiative Co-director, San Diego State 
• Jessica Pressman, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, College of Arts and Letters, San Diego State 
• Katherine D. Harris, Director of Public Programming, College of Humanities & the Arts; Professor of Literature & Digital Humanities @ San José State  – Project Investigator
• Christina Mune, Associate Dean of Innovation & Resource Management, King Library @ San José State 
• Nick Szydlowski, Digital Scholarship Librarian, King Library @ San José State 

For a full list of each campus represented on the Steering Committee, please see People.

Interested faculty, staff, and administrators are welcome to reach out to their campus’s consortium member or to our DH@CSU contact person, Dr. Katherine D. Harris at katherine.harris@sjsu.edu. 

Updated 11/18/23