ACH Executive Council
1. Maira E. Álvarez
Bio: Dr. Maira E. Álvarez is the Jackman Humanities Institute and Critical Digital Humanities Initiative Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities at the University of Toronto for the 2025-2026 academic year. Her interdisciplinary research connects Border Studies, Women’s Studies, Latinx and Latin American Studies, Digital Humanities, public humanities, archives, and heritage language. Previously, she served as the Early Career Provost Postdoctoral Fellow in Borderlands History (2022-2024) at the University of Texas at Austin and was an American Council of Learned Societies Emerging Voices Fellow (2021-2022) at Arizona State University. Maira is a co-founder of Borderlands Archives Cartography and a team member of the projects United Fronteras, Torn Apart / Separados, and Houston’s Latino Visual Art Registry.
Candidate Statement: I am honored to have been nominated for the ACH Executive Council. As the Program Co-Chair for the 2024 ACH virtual conference, I understand the responsibility we have as representatives of ACH, both within our community and beyond. It was a privilege to work with the conference committee to help shape the virtual conference and create a space for meaningful and transformative dialogue. Over the past eight years, I have collaborated on various digital public initiatives focused on social transformation and served as a consultant for several projects supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Mellon Foundation. These experiences have not only enriched my expertise but have also deepened my commitment to community building and advancing social change. If elected, I aim to leverage my experience in fostering compassionate workflows and leadership to support ongoing efforts. Additionally, I hope to build connections with both digital humanities practitioners and non-practitioners across diverse linguistic and geographical boundaries, using technology as a tool to advocate for social transformation.
2. Connie Dowell
Bio: Connie Dowell is pursuing her M.S. in analytics from the Georgia Institute of Technology. She has a background in libraries and university writing center work, where she enjoyed making both educational technology and academic spaces as a whole feel welcoming and approachable to a wide variety of students. Connie is interested in the power of technology to create inclusive learning and research spaces. Her research interests include text mining and the intersection of digital humanities and advocacy.
Candidate Statement: As a newer member of ACH, I have found this community welcoming and encouraging, and I am eager to give back. As a writing center coordinator, I worked with many non-traditional and part-time students and strove to meet their unique needs and make the center a space where all students could feel comfortable and seen. Now, I am a nontraditional student myself and understand those needs and challenges first-hand. If elected, I would be honored to continue the wonderful work that has gone on in this organization while striving to make the ACH accessible to those who have taken the scenic route on their path toward this field.
3. Emily Esten
Bio: In Emily Esten’s (they/them) varied work experience - from project lead to curator, educator to site developer - their primary focus has been shaping collaborations, training, and programming of digital tools for scholarly communication. They are Customer Success Manager at Knowledge Futures, in charge of technical client support for full-stack knowledge infrastructure. Previously, Esten worked as project manager and curator at Penn Libraries, where they spearheaded projects that facilitated access to and use of Penn’s Judaica digital collections. In addition to their day-to-day work, Esten is an instructor at DREAM Lab and a freelance developer for Contingent Magazine and Mark Twain House & Museum. Esten holds a BA in history and digital humanities from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a MA in public humanities from Brown University.
Candidate Statement: My career has prioritized scholarly collaboration and the importance of engaging diverse and dispersed communities. Re-joining ACH excites me for its deep connection to my roots in digital humanities, and the organization’s consistent commitment to these values. At this critical juncture in our social, political, and academic environments, it is alarming to see the decline of conversation on online platforms that have fueled so much research energy. I’m heartened by ACH’s advocacy interests, andI want to play a role in looking at the future of communication for computing in the humanities. I am also interested in expanding professional development opportunities for early-career researchers and independent scholars. As a member of the ACH Executive Council, I will support our community’s research efforts, encourage new membership, and encourage collaboration both within traditional academia and in independent organizations.
4. Amy Gay
Bio: Amy lives in Upstate New York, where she resides with her furry four-legged friends. She currently works at ITHAKA (a nonprofit with a mission to improve access to knowledge and education) as a digital humanities specialist, offering opportunities to interact with the global DH community and explore ways JSTOR tools can be integrated into teaching and research. Before pivoting her career path to ITHAKA, she was a Digital Scholarship Librarian at Binghamton University for 6 years, and she also developed and taught two courses on coding for humanities and social science undergraduate students as part of the Binghamton Codes! program. Amy also spent a year and a half in the D.C. area as a National Digital Stewardship Residency (NDSR) fellow, where she worked on developing a science data catalog at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and supported additional steps for helping scientists and engineers making their data publicly available, such as writing data management plans, data visualization for storytelling, and ways for writing about scientific research in plain language. Amy holds both a Master’s in Library and Information Science and a Master’s in teaching. Her research areas focused on book banning / burning; culturally relevant pedagogy; and cultural heritage preservation during wartime conflict. Her current research passions are in the areas of literacy education (digital, computational, and data) and interactive storytelling. Outside of her work-life, Amy enjoys the local arts and music scene in Binghamton, cooking (and always looking for new recipes to try), and reading and writing fiction.
Candidate Statement: My initial draw to serve on the ACH executive committee is how valuable I have found being part of the ACH conference to be. I attended my first ACH conference in 2019, where I got to present with my Digital Humanities Research Institute (DHRI) cohort on our experiences implementing the DHRI model at our own institutions. The conference sessions have so much breadth across digital humanities areas, which I have learned through both attending the conference and as a past session reviewer. I also just love the community ACH bridges across students, librarians, faculty, researchers, and others. All this to say that being part of the ACH executive committee would be a way for me to give back to this wonderful community that has helped me along my own digital scholarship journey. I enjoy planning events and workshops, so helping with the conference and other professional development events would be a lot of fun. It also provides an opportunity to integrate more into the advocacy side of digital humanities, especially during times like these when DH advocacy is crucial. Thank you for your time reading this and the opportunity to apply. Either way, I am excited to see what lies ahead for digital humanities and ACH.
5. Oriane Guiziou-Lamour
Bio: Oriane Guiziou-Lamour (she/her/hers) is a doctoral candidate from the Department of French Language & Literature at the University of Virginia, and a Praxis Fellow (Scholars’ Lab, UVA’s DH Center). She earned her BA in Foreign Literatures, Languages and Civilizations from the Université de Bretagne Occidentale (Brittany, France), and her MA in General and Comparative Literature from the Université Rennes 2 (Brittany, France). She is interested in the relationship between gender, sexuality and violence, and works on reparative (queer) archives, digital decay, internet ephemerality and sustainability. Her dissertation focuses on late-eighteenth century French women authors of erotic fiction, which allows her to explore subjects such as female expression of desire, sexual violence, lesbian representation, and the active efforts of nineteenth-century politics in erasing women from the literary canon. In her published creative writing, she explores topics such as lesbian cannibalism, violence towards women farmers, and agricultural gore.
Statement: I am honoured to accept the nomination for Executive Council Representative. As a representative, I aim to continue ACH’s mission of diversity and inclusion, of an ethical DH practice, and of decentering DH practices from an Anglophone perspective towards a more global dialogue. As a Praxis Fellow in UVA’s Scholars’ Lab, I have learnt to work on collaborative DH projects, expanding collaboration by working with graduate students, librarians, and staff. My contribution to ACH would encompass making sure that people from different backgrounds are actively included in the discussion: I’m especially interested in the ways the organization could better include and promote the work of first-generation, low-income digital humanists, as well as better visibilize the variety of DH practitioners (alt-ac; librarians; staff…).
6. Abigail Mann
Bio: Abigail Mann is the Digital Scholarship Librarian at Illinois Wesleyan University. Prior to receiving her MSLS, she was a tenured English professor, and has taught a broad variety of courses in diverse formats. As a Digital Scholarship librarian, a significant research focus has been on creating digital scholarship partnerships between teaching faculty and librarians to support innovative research and pedagogy, particularly at less resourced institutions. She has presented this work in multiple national forums, co-authored, with Micah Vandergrift, Immersive Scholars: A Guidebook for Documenting and Publishing Experiential Scholarship Works, and has forthcoming relevant publications in the The AI and Library Instruction Cookbook and Cultures of Scale: Disciplines, Data, and Labor, part of the Debates in the Digital Humanities series. She has also built a Digital Humanities program at her University: after receiving an ALA/NEH Rescue Grant in 2022, she created a summer research fellow experience, which has offered 10-12 students/ year the opportunity to develop and execute a DH project. She has obtained $60,000+ in funding, internal and external, to support this program and, due to student demand, proposed a standing DH course as part of the core curriculum: she is teaching that course for the first time this semester, and it is scheduled to be a yearly offering. She also provides pedagogical support for digital projects across the curriculum, ranging from International Education to English to History.
Candidate Statement: Both my unique career path and my organizational and administrative abilities will allow me to contribute meaningfully to ACH. I began my career as faculty in an English department; I now support DH across campus as a Digital Scholarship librarian, focusing on best practices for helping bring more faculty, particularly those with no formal training and few institutional resources, into DS work, both pedagogical and scholarly. This awareness of paths into DH and resources along them would allow me to work, with the rest of the executive board, in providing guidance and support to those entering the field. My various experiences with DH also allow me to bring ideas and resources to ACH’s work of cultivating and strengthening the field. From a scholarly perspective, I have focused on identifying and making accessible, when appropriate, information about those who have traditionally been excluded or marginalized. This opening up of canons has been a major focus of my pedagogy: just as importantly, I push the use of DH as a way to sharpen critical thinking. Finally, I bring a commitment to serving meaningfully while maximizing others’ voices and contributions. As the twice appointed treasurer of Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies, I oversee finance and scholarships and help to organize an annual 200+ attendee international conference. That work includes thinking about how we continue to create a more welcoming conference environment in the face of shrinking resources and growing ways to engage in scholarship. Having spent two years as a faculty senate chair, I also pride myself of working with fellow executive board members to create and complete concrete goals aligned with our larger goals. In recent years, I have brought this emphasis on facilitation to various service opportunities, including developing professional development symposiums and conferences and creating or revising values statements and frameworks.
7. Stefano Morello
Bio: Stefano Morello is Assistant Director for Digital Projects at the CUNY Graduate Center’s American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning, where he co-manages the New Media Lab and supports graduate students and faculty in developing interdisciplinary digital scholarship. His research combines digital and traditional methods to investigate the infrastructure and transnational reverberations of American popular and unpopular culture. In addition to authoring peer-reviewed articles and book chapters, he has developed public-facing digital projects such as the East Bay Punk Digital Archive and The Lung Block exhibit, which recover the histories of marginalized urban communities. Stefano has contributed to building DH capacity at public institutions in the U.S. and Italy, including designing curricula for the nascent Digital Humanities minor at the City College of New York and, while serving as a research fellow at the University of Eastern Piedmont, integrating for the first time DH into American Studies courses offered in Italy. His commitment to open digital pedagogy is reflected in projects developed collaboratively by students and faculty, such as the Italian American Studies Open Syllabus, Let My People Know, and The Beats in/and Italy, which also serve as teaching materials for underexplored subjects. He is a co-founding editor of JAm It! (Journal of American Studies in Italy), an open-access publication supported by the U.S. Mission to Italy that fosters dialogue between emerging and established scholars. He also serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy.
Candidate Statement: I am excited to stand for election to the ACH Executive Council. I have spent nearly a decade at the intersection of DH and American Studies while building DH capacity and pedagogy at public universities. My experience in service began over a decade ago with the Graduate Student Forum of the Italian Association for American Studies (AISNA)—then a group of a dozen graduate students. In the following eight years (six of which as co-chair), I helped formalize the Forum in AISNA’s bylaws and grow it into a 100+ member network that now drives early-career membership in the organization. I have since served on various committees at the institutions where I have worked and for organizations in my fields of scholarly engagement. As I continue to deepen my engagement with the field of DH, I am especially eager to collaborate with fellow practitioners to give back to ACH and further its mission and initiatives. My experience in governance, project management, and community-building equips me to contribute meaningfully to ACH’s stewardship. As a first-generation college graduate who has struggled to make his way in underfunded educational systems, I have been consistently committed—in both institutional and non-institutional roles—to providing mentorship to underprivileged students and weaving formal and informal networks of support that address the questions I have had to grapple with throughout my career. As Executive Council Representative, in addition to fulfilling ongoing tasks and responsibilities, I am especially eager to explore ways to offer mentorship (particularly for first-gen and international scholars) and amplify the work of and opportunities for early career DH practitioners.
8. Kate Ozment
Bio: Kate Ozment, PhD, is Digital Scholarship Team Leader at Kelvin Smith Library, Case Western Reserve University. She was previously associate professor of English at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. Her research focus on the digital turn in bibliographic studies and how data structures influence what we know, or believe we know, about women's involvement in the Early Modern British book trades.
Candidate Statement: I am interested in serving on the ACH executive committee to help support an organization that has meant a lot to me as a digital humanist moving through different academic spaces. ACH's commitment to social justice, access, equity, and labor rights are close to my heart, and I would do my best to uphold these values and be an active member of the community.
9. Rachel Starry
Bio: Rachel Starry (she/her) is the Head of Digital Scholarship Services at the University of Pittsburgh libraries where she leads a team of library staff in supporting digital humanities and data-intensive research, teaching, and publishing. She holds a PhD in Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology from Bryn Mawr College; it was at Bryn Mawr that she identified a career interest in providing library-based support for under-resourced DH practitioners through her participation in an inaugural cohort of Digital Scholarship Graduate Assistants in the BMC library. Her work in digital humanities began in 2011 when she collaborated on a text mining project analyzing rhyme patterns in Latin and Greek poetry, and since then she has engaged in a wide range of digital projects as both a practitioner and educator. She is a dh+lib Review Editor, serves on the Keystone DH conference planning committee, and sits on the editorial board of the Journal of Critical Digital Librarianship. Her research and professional contributions have focused on humanities data management, sustaining interdisciplinary communities of practice, and accessibility in data visualization and digital projects.
Candidate Statement: I have found ACH to be an incredibly vibrant and welcoming professional community since I attended the ACH conference in 2019, and I particularly love that this community includes and supports DH practitioners in a variety of roles, from students to researchers to library workers like myself. Since 2019 I have sought opportunities to contribute to this organization and its mission, including ACH initiatives in support of anti-racist practices in our field like the publication of "Towards Anti-Racist Technical Terminology" and the associated Inclusive Technology bibliography in 2020. I have greatly appreciated the opportunity to contribute to sustaining ACH through my past service on the ACH Nominations Committee and the Affiliates & Liaisons Committee (as Liaison to the Institute for Liberal Arts Digital Scholarship, ILiADS), and I would be grateful for the opportunity to continue contributing to the mission of ACH as a member of the Executive Council. If elected, I would bring to bear both my expertise in conducting and supporting digital humanities projects as well as a commitment to centering issues of justice and accessibility in the work of this organization.
10. Hazel Wilkinson
Bio: I am Associate Professor of English at the University of Birmingham, UK, where I am also Deputy Director of the Institute for Data and AI (IDAI). I am PI on the Compositor project, compositor.bham.ac.uk, a database of over a million eighteenth-century printers' ornaments. I have published in Digital Humanities Quarterly, presented at the annual ADHO conference, and I won the Göttingen Dialog in Digital Humanities in 2016.
Candidate Statement: I would like to join the Executive Committee of ACH to grow international collaboration between ACH's US members and stakeholders in Europe and beyond. I believe that international representation on the Committee would expand the horizons of ACH, as well as enabling the transfer of knowledge and experience from ACH to UK and European scholars who wish to promote the Digital Humanities, and upskill humanities researchers in the use of data and AI.