When not covered in book dust and magic lantern soot, I study Victorian travel narratives and nineteenth-century material culture through text encoding, topic modeling, mapping, and network analysis. In particular, I excavate the global history of the screen before the age of film through the letters of British missionaries who brought projectors and glass slides with them to Africa and the South Pacific. As part of international digital humanities projects, including Livingstone Online and One More Voice, I collaborate with stakeholder institutions around the world to remediate historic slides, manuscripts, and cultural objects in order to increase access to these materials, critique the limitations of current digitization practices, and foreground perspectives from the global south through digital collections.

I received my Ph.D. in British Literature with a concentration in Victorian literature and a Graduate Certificate in Digital Arts and Humanities from Indiana University. My approach to librarianship is informed by my project management, pedagogy, and publishing experience. As the CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow in Data Curation for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, I supported digital approaches to screen-based media in the global south. I designed finding aids and teaching materials in Spanish and English for Archivo Mesoamericano, a digital archive of videos created in collaboration with the Center for Research and Advanced Studies in SocialAnthropology (CIESAS) in Mexico, the Institute of History of Nicaragua and Central America (IHNCA) in Nicaragua, and the Museum of the Word and the Image (MUPI) in El Salvador. In my role as the Digital Pedagogy Specialist for the Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities (IDAH), I collaborated with faculty, librarians, and staff to design class materials that introduced students to discipline-specific analytical skills through digital approaches. Transitioning to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign enabled me to support digital-born monographs in Pressbooks, Omeka, and Scalar as the Digital Publishing Specialist for the Illinois Open Publishing Network.

In my current position as the Digital Humanities Librarian at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, I empower scholars from the humanities and the social sciences to experiment with digital approaches to cultural heritage materials, develop research projects, and reflect on the impact of machine learning and artificial intelligence on scholarship and artistic practice.

Here's a sampling of my digital humanities work: