Digital Humanities Fellows

Luisa J. Garcés Sierra 

 Spanish and Portuguese

Luisa J. Garcés Sierra is a PhD candidate in the Spanish and Portuguese Department at the University of Kansas. Her digital humanities project, Las están matando, documents and commemorates the lives of female social leaders and human rights defenders in Colombia who have been murdered since the 2016 peace agreement. The project critically engages with official narratives that downplay these deaths, highlighting the activism of these women and revealing the systemic violence they faced. By employing digital humanities tools such as data visualization and mapping technologies, Las están matando situates these women’s stories within their geographic and social contexts, offering deeper insights into their struggles. 

In its next phase, the project will expand its digital archive and incorporate storytelling from surviving women leaders. It seeks to contribute meaningfully to the fields of gender studies, social justice, and digital humanities, serving both as a platform for advocacy and a valuable resource for understanding the broader impact of gendered violence in Colombia. Las están matando also invites collaboration with scholars and activists working on related issues, aiming to foster broader conversations around the intersections of gender, violence, and social justice. 

Elizabeth MacGonagle 

History and African & African-American Studies  

Elizabeth MacGonagle is an associate professor in the Departments of History and African & African-American Studies. Her project showcases a collection of popular literature at KU’s Spencer Research Library that originated in the eastern Nigerian city of Onitsha in the 1960s. This genre consists of stories, plays, advice, and moral discourses published by local presses for sale in the bookstalls of Onitsha’s large market. More than 100 pamphlets from the market are preserved at the Spencer Research Library, including 21 digital versions on the Internet available as open source materials. She will update a companion website about the role of Onitsha market literature in Nigerian popular culture that draws on DH tools to convey the energy, chaos, and color of a West African society that come alive in handbooks offering advice in the face of adversity or tips for love relationships. Some booklets illustrate a moral through a drama ending in disaster, while others detail the trials and tribulations that a protagonist must overcome to achieve success in a fast-paced urban environment. The website will highlight engaging scholarship about the genre and create teaching tools that demonstrate the cultural significance and aesthetic value of these entertaining pamphlets. 

Emily Monty 

Art History 

Emily Monty is an assistant professor in Art History. As an IDRH Digital Humanities fellow, she will work on the project A Portal to the Fagel Collection in partnership with Dr. Maria Elisa Navarro Morales, assistant professor in the History of Architecture at Trinity College Dublin (TCD). Supported by the Trinity Long Room Hub and collaboration with Unlocking the Fagel Collection, the project centers on an exceptional extant library from the eighteenth-century Dutch Republic. The library has been studied through the lens of its compilers, who served as chief political advisors to the Stadtholder. A Portal to the Fagel Collection uses the Fagel family library, preserved at TCD, as a research tool for understanding the broader collections once displayed alongside the books, including medals, paintings, drawings, ancient gems, and interior furnishings. The project merges traditional tools of historical inquiry—such as study of architectural drawings and building fragments; inventories; sale records; and visitors’ accounts—with new digital tools to create interactive virtual environments. It aims to reunify the dispersed collections within the reconstructed space of the now-demolished library, stressing the visual and spatial coherence of the original context in a platform designed to engage both scholars and the public. 

Kip Perry 

History 

Kip Perry is a third year History PhD candidate and Indigenous Studies graduate certificate student. Kip’s project builds on an ArcGIS project they began during their M.A. at NC State University, which focused on the rapid spread of Klu Klux Klan branches, or “Klaverns,” across the US in the early twentieth century. Since scholars often correlate initial screenings of Birth of a Nation with the rise of the second Klan, Kip used initial film screening data to analyze the relationship between the two using the Southwest as a case study. This analysis, in addition to population density and demographic data they gathered, serves as building blocks for a more comprehensive investigation into the role of media in belonging and nationalism in the early 1900s. This year, Kip will incorporate additional print media sources such as newspaper advertisements of white supremacist media like Birth of a Nation and releases of novels such as Thomas Dixon's The Clansman for analysis. 

As a fellow, Kip will build a public-facing, interactive website featuring their maps and sources in an effort to promote accessibility, conversation, and critical thinking about the history of race and racism in the United States beyond the ivory tower.

Margarita Rivera Arrivillaga 

Anthropology 

Margarita Rivera Arrivillaga is a first year PhD student in the Sociocultural Anthropology program at KU. Her doctorate research project includes participatory and art-based elements as tools for dissemination and advocacy. The proposed project for the IDRH fellowship focuses on ethics, community engagement and the transformative justice-oriented aspects in Digital Humanities. She will create an open-source web page to share some of the results of the various stages of her doctoral dissertation and present the webpage as its additional multimodal component. She will follow examples of former international Human Rights projects that have published graphic material based on audiovisual references, and original testimonies of people involved in events of Serious Human Rights violations. 

Oluwaseun Sanwoolu 

Philosophy 

Oluwaseun D. Sanwoolu is a PhD student in the Department of Philosophy and a graduate research assistant at the Center for Cyber-Social Dynamics. Her Digital Humanities project is focused on creating a public-facing philosophical archive that examines how ethical and technological issues, especially in relation to artificial intelligence, are portrayed in media. This archive will allow visitors to explore a wide range of films, TV shows, and digital content, accompanied by in-depth philosophical analysis of the ethical implications presented in these portrayals. The goal of the project is to assess whether media representations of ethical theories, such as utilitarianism and deontology, offer substantive engagement with complex philosophical concepts or instead reinforce misconceptions—particularly around AI technologies. By curating a diverse collection of media that prominently features philosophical themes, her project will create an accessible resource that caters to students, scholars, and the general public alike. The archive seeks to bridge the gap between academic philosophy and everyday media, providing clear, engaging analyses of how philosophical ideas are presented in popular culture.  

Rachel Schwaller 

History and Religious Studies 

“Unsettled Lawrence” centers (what is considered to be) alternative forms of settlement in the city of Lawrence, paying most attention to chronic encampment and houselessness (broadly defined). This project uses an interdisciplinary combination of ethnography, oral history recording, co-participatory photography, and archival research to recognize the encamped and houseless population as pivotal to the settlement of Lawrence across time, even while they are treated as social outcasts. Working with the IDRH, Unsettled Lawrence will produce a public facing website with oral history recordings from current unhoused peoples and photography of encampments in order to demonstrate the skills it takes to build a sustainable campsite in Lawrence. This website will also include a mapping project of Lawrence that will track encampments across time, revealing key figures in Lawrence history that have been entirely overlooked. The project will also reveal the ways encampment and houselessness has been stigmatized and racialized in Lawrence and dealt with in the same way across time, specifically stigmatization, criminalization, and forced relocation.  

Dominique Stringer 

Museum Studies  

Dominique Stringer is a graduate student in Museum Studies, and her digital humanities project seeks to tell the stories of Jewish immigration to Kansas through a digital archive of letters, photographs, and oral histories. Focusing on the often-unseen labor of Jewish women in Kansas, the archive will explore the social pressures that pushed Jewish immigrants into the Midwest in the 20thcentury, as well as the support structures they built to maintain community connections. By considering the ways in which Jewish immigrants have integrated into communities while simultaneously resisting assimilation, this project shows how Jewish people have navigated cultural isolation and discrimination within the Midwest. The idea for this digital project developed from a pop-up exhibition, Homemaking: Building the Jewish Community of Kansas, which is currently available to view here on the KU Jewish Studies website. Extending beyond the idea of a single narrative of immigration, this digital project will provide a broad look at the diverse ways that people have interpreted Jewishness as the diaspora has brought them to the Midwest.