Department Research Seminar: Earhart

A Compromised Infrastructure: Digital Humanities, African American Literary History and Technologies of Identity

Amy Earhart | Texas A&M University

| ABSTRACT |

The seminar will focus on a portion of Earhart’s current monograph project, A Compromised Infrastructure: Digital Humanities, African American Literary History, and Technologies of Identity, which examines how infrastructures, technological and institutional, construct and deconstruct race/ethnicity and gender identities. Focusing on two central infrastructures, the database, a commonly used technological infrastructure in the digital humanities, and the anthology, a scholarly and pedagogical infrastructure, the seminar will discuss how such seemingly naturalized infrastructures impact the representation and modeling of identity. Earhart will discuss the example of The Database of African American and Predominantly White American Literature Anthologies or DALA, a database she developed of almost 100 years of generalist American and African American literature anthologies, constructed to investigate questions of identity and representation in literary anthologies and, by extension, the larger literary canon.

| BIO |

Amy E. Earhart is Associate Professor of English and affiliated faculty of Africana Studies at Texas A&M University. In 2020, Earhart received a NEH-Mellon Fellowship for Digital Publication for her book length digital project “Digital Humanities and the Infrastructures of Race in African-American Literature.” Earhart has published scholarship on a variety of digital humanities topics, with work that includes a monograph Traces of Old, Uses of the New: The Emergence of Digital Literary Studies (U Michigan Press 2015), a co-edited collection The American Literature Scholar in the Digital Age (U Michigan Press 2010), and a number of articles and book chapters in volumes including the Debates in Digital Humanities series, DHQ, DSH: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Digital Studies/Le champ numérique, and Textual Cultures. Her current book, “A Compromised Infrastructure: Digital Humanities, African American Literary History and Technologies of Identity,” is under advance contract with Stanford University Press.