The African American History, Culture and Digital Humanities (AADHum) initiative at the University of Maryland is proud to announce the 2019–2020 cohort of AADHum scholars. Started in 2017, this community of practice centers Black life and theory in their extensive engagement with digital tools. Most importantly, this program offers AADHum scholars space and support to incubate their own Black Digital Humanities (DH) work. This marks the third and most competitive year of AADHum’s premier program.

AADHum is delighted to welcome a cohort that is actively working to make significant interventions in Black DH through American Studies, History, English, Geography and Sociology. The cohort is furthered enriched by a broad range of career stages and trajectories, as well as institutional affiliations among the scholars.

The AADHum Scholars program is generously funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, as well as by the College of Arts & Humanities and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities at the University of Maryland….

Johnson’s second book project, Dark Codex: History, Blackness and the Digital explores how images and texts created in difficult pasts resonate across digital and social media. In Dark Codex, she explores the ways research, teaching, and theories generated from the study of Atlantic African diaspora history and les damnes de terre—the dispossessed, the fugitives, queer folk, immigrants and femmes of color—function as the unforeseen and oft-ignored heart of the field of Digital Humanities. Johnson’s AADHum project involves the creation of what she calls “speculative censuses,” or datasets that surface the uncounted and unaccounted for in eighteenth-century Louisiana archives of slavery as a route into Black fugitivity beyond dispossession.