Sarah Aponte (she/ella)
Professor and Chief Librarian, CUNY Dominican Studies Institute, City College
Sarah Aponte is the Chief Librarian of the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute and Professor at The City College of New York Libraries. She founded the Dominican Library in 1994 with donations of books by the Council of Dominican Educators and is the first Dominican librarian solely dedicated to Dominican studies in the United States. She assists scholars and students undertaking research on Dominican issues and conducts educational workshops using archival and library resources. She is the author of many articles, bibliographies, book chapters and books related to Dominican studies.
Jim Casey (he/him/his)
Director, Douglass Day, Center for Black Digital Research, Penn State
Jim Casey is an assistant professor of African American Studies, History, and English at Penn State, where he serves as associate director of the Center for Black Digital Research. He is co-editor with P. Gabrielle Foreman of The Colored Conventions Movement: Black Organizing in the Nineteenth Century (UNC Press). Dedicated to collaborative modes, he helps run Douglass Day and the Colored Conventions Project and is completing on a book project on the history of editorship and print collaboration in the nineteenth-century United States. As part of the Editorship Studies Collective, he is co-editing Cultures of Scale: Disciplines, Data, and Labor, a proposed volume for the Debates in the Digital Humanities series at University of Minnesota Press.
Robin DeRosa (she/her)
Director of Learning & Libraries, Plymouth State University
Robin DeRosa is Director of Learning & Libraries at Plymouth State University, where she has also served as an English Professor and Director of Interdisciplinary Studies. She is a national advocate for accessible and equitable approaches to higher education, and committed to developing a sustainable, humane, and learner-centered future for public higher education, in particular.
Isabel M. Estrada (she/her)
Professor of Iberian and Latin American Cultures, City College of New York
Prof. Isabel Estrada is the author of ‘Democrazy in Spain: Cinema and New Forms of Social Life (1968-2008)’ (Liverpool University Press 2024) and El documental cinematográfico y televisivo contemporáneo: memoria, representación y formación de la identidad democrática española (Tamesis 2013). Prof. Estrada has published articles in refereed journals such as Modern Language Notes, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, Studies in Hispanic Cinemas, Hispanic Review, Bulletin of Spanish Studies, España Contemporánea, Catalan Review, and Revista Hispánica Moderna. She has also contributed to the volumes Approaches to Teaching the Works of Carmen Martín Gaite (2013), Perceptions of the Holocaust in Modern Spanish Culture (Leipzig Studies on Jewish History and Culture, 2009), and Historias de la pequeña pantalla: Representaciones históricas en la televisión de la España democrática (2008).
Ann Fiddler (she/her)
University Open Education Librarian CUNY
Ann Fiddler is the University Open Education Librarian for CUNY in the Office of the Dean of Library Services. Ann has been overseeing Open Educational Resource initiatives at the CUNY colleges funded by New York State since 2017. In addition to saving students money, the goal of this project has been to create a culture openness and open pedagogy. She has been the principal investigator for grants in support of OER from Achieving the Dream, The Gates Foundation, and The Public Interest Technology Network.
Kelly Baker Josephs (she/her)
Professor of English at the University of Miami
Kelly Baker Josephs is Professor of English at the University of Miami. She is the author of Disturbers of the Peace: Representations of Insanity in Anglophone Caribbean Literature (2013) and coeditor of The Digital Black Atlantic (2021). She is currently Director of the Caribbean Digital Scholarship summer institute, co-organizer of The Caribbean Digital annual conference, and co-principal investigator of the Caribbean Digital Scholarship Collective, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon foundation.
Jojo Karlin (she/her)
Digital Scholarship Specialist, NYU Libraries
Jojo Karlin — New England born visual artist and academic living in NYC. Between her roots in the theater and her role as Digital Scholarship Specialist at NYU Libraries, she observes and illustrates (mostly in pen and watercolor) the performance of academic research, often live sketching conferences (#jojodoodles). She has worked as artist in residence for the Book History and Print Culture Colloquium, NYU’s Institute of Public Knowledge, and featured as part of the CUNY 1969 Project. Her illustrated monograph, Yours Sincerely, Virginia Woolf, will be forthcoming from Columbia University Press. For more, go to jojokarlin.com and follow @jojokarlin on instagram.
Stacy Katz (she/her)
Open Resources Librarian, Lehman College
Stacy Katz is an Associate Professor and Open Resources Librarian-STEM Liaison at Lehman College. She initiated and developed the Open Education initiative for the college, including development of open textbooks, adapting for local contexts and including anti-racist pedagogy in the process. Stacy’s research has focused on Open Education and appeared in journals such as Open Praxis, Journal for Multicultural Education, and the New Review of Academic Librarianship. Stacy is a facilitator for the Rebus Textbook Success Program, as well as an OER Research Fellow and Institute for Research Design in Librarianship Scholar. She participates as a research mentor for fellow librarians.
Andrew McKinney (he/him/his)
Director of Research and Publishing Strategy, CUNY Office of Library Services
Andrew McKinney, PhD is the Director of Research and Publishing Strategy for the City University of New York’s Office of Library Services. In this role he helps oversee the CUNY OER Initiative, manages CUNY’s open access repository CUNY Academic Works, and is directing the creation of the CUNY Open Press, a new digital imprint highlighting the innovative work that CUNY faculty, students, and staff are doing in their classrooms and beyond.
Stefano Morello (he/him)
PhD Candidate, The Graduate Center (CUNY) and Digital Humanities Specialist, City College of New York
Stefano Morello is a researcher, educator, and curator, currently completing his PhD in English at the CUNY Graduate Center. His research and teaching interests include popular and unpopular culture, transnational American Studies, and digital humanities. Stefano’s public-facing collaborative projects include the East Bay Punk Digital Archive, The Beats in/and Italy, and The Lung Block exhibit, among other digital publications and archival recovery endeavors. He is also a co-founder and co-editor-in-chief of JAm It! (Journal of American Studies in Italy). In July, he will transition to a new role as Assistant Director for Digital Projects at the American Social History Project.
Courtney Murray (she/her)
PhD Candidate in English and African American Studies, Pennsylvania State University
Courtney Murray is a Dual-Title PhD Candidate in the Departments of English and African American Studies and a #DigBlk Scholar at the Center for Black Digital Research (CBDR). Her research focuses on 19th c. African American Diasporic archives and literature and how those texts engage with Black feminisms, space/time, fugitivity, and liberation. At the CBDR, she works on the Communication Committee for Douglass Day and serves in various research roles for the Colored Conventions Project. Her dissertation research examines how enclosed spaces cultivated nineteenth-century African American and African diasporic spatial thought in printed media.
Juan Jesús Payán (he/him/él)
Associate Professor. Dept. Languages and Literatures. Lehman College (CUNY)
He holds two PhDs, in Hispanic Philology (University of Cádiz, Spain), and Hispanic Languages and Literatures (UCLA). After devoting some years to the research of Twentieth-century Latin American poetry, he has focused on Nineteenth-century Hispanic fantastic aesthetics. He is the author of over 20 articles in academic journals and four books. His latest books, “Cadencia rota” (poetry) and “Los conjuros del asombro” (monograph) were released in 2023. He is preparing new collections of poetry and a study on the role and representations of Goya in contemporary graphic novels. In the last five years, he has deeply engaged in Open Educational Pedagogies.
Tyechia Thompson (she/her)
Assistant Professor/ Virginia Tech
Tyechia Thompson is Assistant Professor of English at Virginia Tech whose areas of research include African American literature, digital humanities, and manuscript and archival studies. She is the creator of “Baldwin’s Paris.” She co-creator and co-host of the podcast “The Inside Story,” funded by an American Council of Learned Societies Digital Justice Seed Grant. She is the instructor and executive producer of the mobile application “Hip Hop Lit” in the Apple App Store. She is the recipient of an NEH-Mellon Digital Publication Fellowship for the project “Place, Memory, Poetry, and the James A. Emanuel Papers at the Library of Congress.”
Gabriela Baeza Ventura (She/Her/Ella )
University of Houston
Dr. Gabriela Baeza Ventura is associate professor of Spanish with a specialization in US Latinx literature in the Department of Hispanic Studies at the University of Houston. She is deputy director at Arte Público Press, the premier US Latino publishing house, director of Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage Program and co-founder of the US Latino Digital Humanities center. Baeza Ventura has served on the committee of Next-Generation Historical and Scholarly Digital Editions by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She advised on US Latinx archives and data collecting to NHPRC and was appointed to the Mellon-ACLS funded Commission on Fostering and Sustaining Diverse Digital Scholarship (2021-2023). Baeza Ventura has published on various aspects of US Latino literature and digital humanities including women, immigration, recovery works, language and YA and children’s literary production.
Carolina Villarroel (she/her)
Brown Foundation Director of Research/Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage Program/Co-director USLDH
Carolina A. Villarroel holds a PhD in Spanish literature with a specialization in US Latino Literature and Women’s Studies from the University of Houston. She is the former archivist in charge of the Mexican American and African American Collections at the Houston Metropolitan Research Center. Her expertise in US Latino culture and literature has been fundamental to her positions at the University of Houston (UH), where she is the Director of Research of the Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage. She and her colleague, Gabriela Baeza Ventura, are also the founders of the US Latino Digital Humanities Center.
