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Today was my last official day as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Brown's Center for Public Humanities ( @publichumans), a job I've held since Fall 2015. I wanted to wrap things up on a positive note with a thread about some of the work I'm most proud of during my time here.
I taught a number of graduate-level courses for @publichumans, from Digital Public Humanities to Digital Storytelling to Digital Archives and Digital Publics. You can see all of those course sites here: https://jimmcgrath.us/teaching/
My first course at Brown was Digital Public Humanities in the Spring of 2016. It was my first time teaching a graduate course and I could not have asked for a better class of students. Also interesting to look back at how my ideas of DH and public humanities changed over time.
In the Fall of 2017 I ran "Digital Public Humanities" again, but this time with the amazing folks over at Providence Public Library Special Collections ( @TheSpecialest). I wrote about that class in Doing Public Humanities: https://jimmcgrath.us/teaching/new-publication-doing-public-humanities/
My last grad course at Brown was "Digital Archives and Digital Publics," this past spring. I could not have asked for a better class of students to wrap up my time with this graduate program. Currently writing letters of rec for some of them now! …https://digitalarchivesanddigitalpublics.jimmcgrath.us/
This past spring I also co-taught "Mapping Violence," an undergraduate course with the amazing @MonicaMnzMtz and Edwin Rodriguez. A really difficult class at times to teach but one that became more relevant and felt more essential as the year went on.
I can not say enough nice things about
@MonicaMnzMtz. I've worked on her Mapping Violence project since 2015 and it was fantastic to be her colleague and friend over the years. She is as amazing as you think she is. Just a truly inspiring person. Higher ed does not deserve her.
@MonicaMnzMtz. I've worked on her Mapping Violence project since 2015 and it was fantastic to be her colleague and friend over the years. She is as amazing as you think she is. Just a truly inspiring person. Higher ed does not deserve her.
I've managed to write quite a bit during my time at Brown, for Digital Humanities Quarterly, American Quarterly, History@Work, and other publications. The select publications section on my personal site has an overview: https://jimmcgrath.us/
I also made a podcast at Brown, with the awesomely-talented @golcheski. 12 episodes of Public Work, surveying a range of talented @publichumans and associates. https://blogs.brown.edu/publicworkpodcast/
I was fortunate to run programming at times at Brown. One of my highlights on that front was "Reading, Resisting, and Reimagining The Map," a collaboration with @ashleymchamp and María Victoria Fernández that included a talk by @roopikarisam! https://www.brown.edu/academics/public-humanities/blog/reading-resisting-and-reimagining-map
I was also proud to bring @e_salvaggio, a @WikiEducation Visiting Scholar specializing in Ethnic Studies, to @publichumans. This collaboration really helped increase the visibility and value of Wikipedia editing around campus: https://www.brown.edu/academics/public-humanities/blog/wikipedia-visiting-scholar-jnbc
More recently I was thrilled to be part of the Advisory Committee supporting the amazing Wikipedia work of Janaya Kizzie, the Rhode Island Arts and Culture Research Fellow @rihumanities. https://rihumanities.org/humanities-council-introduces-ri-arts-and-culture-research-fellow-janaya-kizzie/
I was part of a number of great collaborative projects during my time at Brown, from Rhode Tour to a Digital Tour of the Nightingale-Brown House. And with the amazing @reconstitut and Inge Zwart, Day of Public Humanities ( @DayofPH). https://jimmcgrath.us/digitalprojects/
I'm still part of one of the projects I'm most proud of on that front: the Rhode Island COVID-19 Archive, a collaboration between @provlib and @RIHistory. What a team of fantastic people. Excited to keep working on this in a volunteer capacity: http://ricovidarchive.org/
One of my last @publichumans public performances was a lecture on Animal Crossing and networked publics. This was a fun bit of counterprogramming during the early days of the pandemic:
It was really great to work with @marisa_angell on lots of public humanities programming, from last fall's Radical Cartography conference to the Hacking Heritage unconference (which somehow is five years old now!). Marisa is a true rock star tbh: https://blogs.brown.edu/hackingheritageunconference/
I could go on, and I'm sure I'm missing stuff in this thread. Documenting this here because it's hard to say goodbye to a place you worked at for five years when it's not on your terms, for a number of reasons. I'm very proud of the work I did at Brown during this time.
Of course, none of this would have been possible without @susansmulyan (sorry I made you wait this long Susan!). Susan took a chance on me at Brown and I will never forgot how supportive and enthusiastic she was throughout my time here. You're the absolute best, Susan.
Anyway, that's it for me on Brown (for a bit, at least). Thanks to everyone who made my life better during these last five years. I'll miss you and I hope to see many of you down the road. I'm going to go sit on the porch for a while and hang out with my dog.
