ACH 2026 Elections

by Pam Lach

All current members of ACH are eligible to vote. Those wanting to vote in the election must join or renew their membership (if expired) by March 20, 2026. Voting is anticipated to open April 1 via a Qualtrics survey that will be emailed directly to all members.

To check your membership status:

  1. Visit https://members.ach.org/
  2. On the Membership dropdown menu, select “Login”
  3. Once logged in, hover over the same “Membership” menu and select “Member Dashboard”
  4. Scroll to the bottom to confirm your membership expiration date
  5. If you need to renew, you can do so by clicking on the “renew your membership” link at the top of the page. If you experience problems renewing, you may need to log out.

A note about the ballot: Names are listed in alphabetical order by position.

Nominees for ACH Co-Vice Presidents/Co-Presidents Elect

1. Eduard Arriaga

Bio: Eduard Arriaga is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Language, Literature and Culture at Clark University. He has published six books and numerous articles on literature, literary theory and digital humanities, Afro-Latinx and Black digital humanities in outlets such as DHQ, Debates in the Digital Humanities, Hispania, etc. His most recent co-edited volume, Afro-Latinx Digital Connections (Florida Press, 2021) is a collection of essays and interviews that explore ways in which Black Latinx communities engage our digital world. He is currently working on a book project under contract with Vanderbilt University Press, tentatively titled Afro-Brazilian Community Data Networks.

Candidate Statement: I am excited to stand for election for the role of Vice-President of the ACH, so I can continue to help making the association and the digital humanities spaces where care and community building go hand in hand with the development of scholarly and professional goals. I have been honored to serve as an ACH council representative for the last four years in diverse capacities: member of the conference committee (2023, 2024, 2025), member of the professional development committee (2023 and 2024) liaison for the DH2025 (ADHO) Conference Program committee, and publications liaison (2026). All these experiences have allowed me not only to get to know better the association but also to explore the diversity of perspectives that are part of our growing digital humanities communities. As ACH Vice-President, I welcome the opportunity to continue placing social justice and human values at the center of ACH and the digital humanities as a complex field of research, practice, and scholarship. In this capacity, I also expect to bring my intercultural, multilingual, and international experience to continue making the ACH much more inclusive and expanded in its pursuing to fostering our shared humanity in an age of computational and algorithmic determinism.

2. Mandy Regan and Brandon Walsh

Bio: Amanda (Mandy) Regan is an Assistant Professor of History and Interim Associate Director of the Digital History Ph.D. program at Clemson University—the nation's first. She has served as ACH Communications Officer since 2024 and as ACH Liaison to the American Historical Association. As a historian of the late 19th and 20th centuries, she specializes in women, gender, and sexuality as well as digital humanities methods and pedagogy. She is co-director of Mapping the Gay Guides, an award-winning digital history project that explores the historical geography of LGBTQ life in North America. Her scholarship appears in Digital Futures of Graduate Study in the Humanities, the Journal of Sport History, and the Journal of Digital History. Her book, Shaping Up: Physical Fitness Initiatives for Women, 1880-1965, is forthcoming with the University of Virginia Press.

Brandon Walsh is Head of Student Programs in the Scholars’ Lab, a part of the Digital Humanities Center in the University of Virginia Library. His primary research focuses on digital humanities pedagogy, looking at the ways it can reflect and enact infrastructural change in higher education. He was a regular instructor at HILT, and he serves on the editorial board of The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy. He has work published or forthcoming with Programming Historian, Insights, the Digital Library Pedagogy Cookbook, Pedagogy, Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities, and Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, among others. His current book project is entitled Embedded Pedagogies: Digital Humanities Teaching and the Infrastructure of Change (under review). He currently serves as the ACH liaison to the Modern Languages Association and previously as a member of ACH's Executive Council.

Candidate Statement: We believe professional organizations should be communities of care, and our current moment demands this work be active and intentional. ACH has modeled this approach through recent advocacy—mobilizing around NEH funding threats, organizing town halls, and creating resources for affected members. We're committed to sustaining and expanding this care-based approach to professional community by focusing on mutual aid and collective action that centers the needs of early-career scholars, students, and staff.

We envision focusing our own efforts on three areas:

  1. Professional Development - We resolve to work in partnership with other digital humanities training organizations as we build ACH into a space that empowers teachers and students working with emerging technologies. We will assess this year's pre-conference ACH workshop pilot and build it into a sustained space for professional and pedagogical development.
  2. Digital Humanities in Public - We need digital humanists in public now more than ever. During our term, we plan to build on previous rapid response efforts and training opportunities to prepare digital humanists to leverage their research and teaching in the public sphere. We also promise to shape a community that acts in solidarity with those who attempt to do so.
  3. Impact of Artificial Intelligence - We cannot ignore that artificial intelligence is reshaping higher education and digital humanities in ways that don't necessarily align with our values. AI is likely to affect all corners of digital humanities work from our research methods to our pedagogical practices and institutional relationships. We will remain committed to ensuring that ACH leads critical conversations about how humanistic values, ethics, and justice should guide our engagement with these technologies.

This statement is our own, but we envision this work as collective. We hope to use our term to elevate and enable the contributions and energies of our community. It takes all of us.

Nominees for ACH Executive Council

1. Grace Afsari-Mamagani

Bio: Grace Afsari-Mamagani (she/they) is a product lead at WorkIt Labs, a nonprofit tech studio developing tools to support labor unions, organizers, and movements in building worker power. On the side, she is a doctoral candidate in English at New York University, where her research has focused on applications of literary study and women of color feminist theory to data ethics and pedagogy. She has taught courses in generative AI and stylometrics, surveillance studies, critical data studies, and humanities computing, and continues to run data and design workshops for DH practitioners. Grace received her MA in English from NYU, with a focus on contemporary U.S. immigrant literature, DH, and GIS. Throughout her decade-long career in public interest tech, she has applied the frameworks she has cultivated in digital humanities spaces — including participatory design and data justice — to projects impacting underserved communities across the U.S.

Candidate Statement: When I first attended ACH in 2019, I was struck by the diversity, interdisciplinarity, and collaboration at the community’s core. As a member of the Executive Council, I hope to renew my commitment both to the ACH and to digital humanities as a broader community of practice. I have spent much of my career delivering programs and services to hundreds of community-based organizations, cultural institutions, and constituents across the U.S. and Latin America. Along the way, I have had the privilege of consulting on DH and ethical technology projects funded by the NEH, NSF, Henry Luce Foundation, and Irvine Foundation, among others. I believe this combined background positions me to support ACH’s advocacy and bridge-building work, particularly in a political moment where humanities funding (and many of our very identities) are under attack. I’m particularly eager to champion ACH’s commitment to mentorship and professional development for members across disciplines and skill levels. My relationship to DH is, admittedly, fairly unconventional, as I don’t inhabit an institutional position typical of an ACH Council member. However, my experience has allowed me to be a resource for dozens of students as they have considered the diverse potential applications of their DH educations — I’d be grateful to continue to build infrastructure and resources that expand the horizon of possibilities for students and early-career DH scholars. Now, in my daily life leading a team of software engineers and designers, I attribute my professional ethics of care primarily to my training in the humanities, and I hope to bring that perspective to the ACH Executive Council if elected.

2. Hannah Alpert-Abrams

Bio: Hannah Alpert-Abrams (she/they) is a writer, scholar, labor advocate, grants administrator, and member of Sidra Collaborative. Hannah entered digital humanities dramatically in 2013 when she published a regrettably aggressive takedown of a scholarly article written by two grad students who would go on to become leaders in the field. Since then, she has tried to develop a more supportive, generous, and community-oriented approach to DH while working in special collections libraries managing culturally sensitive digital collections and in the NEH Offices of Digital Humanities and Data and Evaluation. Hannah's favorite DH project to work on was the Academic Psychic Friends Network, a satirical tarot deck and virtual community space developed during the height of the coronavirus lockdown. Other favorite projects include the Academic Job Market Support Network, the Visionary Futures Collective, Where the Money Resides, Finding Your Purpose, and Taking Action in Higher Ed.

Candidate Statement: I am honored to accept the nomination for Executive Council at ACH. As a representative, I would be interested in thinking about how we can build infrastructure for ACH as an organization that advocates for the interests of its members and provides material support to foster digital humanities scholarship. During a time of austerity and public attacks on the humanities, coupled with rampant technosolutionism unfettered by humanities perspectives, digital humanists deserve a space that will protect us, care for us, fight with us, and allow us to thrive.

3. Sara Arribas Colmenar

Bio: Dr. Sara Arribas Colmenar is Data Artist and a Lecturer in Spanish at Christopher Newport University. She holds a Ph.D. in Spanish and Visual Studies from Penn State University. At Penn State, she served as a Graduate Research Assistant in Digital Liberal Arts in the Digital Pedagogies and Initiatives Office, where she developed expertise in digital methodologies and collaborative project design. Her interdisciplinary digital scholarship explores the intersections of literature, performance, and visual culture in early twentieth-century Spain, with a particular focus on gender studies, archival research, and Social Network Analysis. By integrating digital humanities tools with cultural and performance studies, she maps interdisciplinary artistic communities and collaborative spaces such as the literary gatherings at Café Pombo, the Residencia de Señoritas, and the Ballets Espagnols dance company. Her research highlights how these creative networks fostered artistic innovation and redefined women’s roles within Spain’s cultural sphere. Through this work, she analyzes how intellectual and artistic collaboration shaped the country’s cultural landscape, underscoring the transformative power of cross-disciplinary exchange in literature, dance, and performance. At Christopher Newport University, Dr. Arribas Colmenar actively supports institutional Digital Humanities initiatives. She is a convener of the 5x5 Lab, a faculty-driven collaborative space where colleagues develop and refine digital humanities projects, and she serves on the Digital Humanities Minor Committee, contributing to the ongoing development and revision of the DH curriculum within the College. Through this work, she fosters interdisciplinary dialogue and builds sustainable, community-centered digital practices grounded in collaboration, mutual respect, and shared learning.

Candidate Statement: I would be honored to serve on the Executive Council and to contribute to ACH’s continued efforts to cultivate an equitable, supportive, and forward-looking Digital Humanities community. My work in Digital Humanities has been shaped not only by projects and methodologies, but by community. I am a member of the #DHMakes community, where digital humanities are approached through practices of care, mutual support, and collective making. In that space, I have experienced firsthand how transformative it can be to build networks grounded in generosity, listening, and collaboration. Without that community, my own digital project and professional growth would not have been possible. I believe the future of Digital Humanities depends on our ability to cultivate spaces where we serve and support one another, especially across institutions, ranks, and career stages. As convener of the 5x5 Lab at CNU, I have seen how vital it is to create environments where faculty can experiment, ask questions, share unfinished ideas, and build projects collaboratively. This work, along with my service on the Digital Humanities Minor Committee, has deepened my understanding of the opportunities and challenges faced by teaching-focused institutions and emerging DH programs. I am particularly attentive to issues of access, curricular development, and long-term institutional sustainability. If elected as Executive Council Representative, I would work to strengthen ACH’s role as a platform for connection, mentorship, and advocacy across diverse institutional contexts. I am especially committed to initiatives that support emerging scholars, faculty at smaller institutions, and practitioners navigating hybrid roles in teaching and digital scholarship. I am also interested in advancing conversations around sustainability, and practices that foreground equity and care. Serving on the Executive Council would be an opportunity to contribute meaningfully to a field that has profoundly shaped my professional path.

4. Samantha Blickhan

Bio: Dr. Samantha Blickhan (she/her) is co-Director and Humanities Lead for the Zooniverse.org crowdsourcing platform. In her role, she guides the strategic vision for Zooniverse Humanities efforts, manages development of new digital tools and resources, consults with researchers on building and running projects, and produces original research about crowdsourcing, digital humanities, sustainable development, ethics in public participatory research, and user experience design. An active fiber artist, she is a member of the #DHMakes community and uses her experiences as a maker to inspire new thoughts around ideas like optimization, value, labor and the concept of ‘wasted’ time. Her work has been supported by funding from the IMLS, NEH, NSF, ACLS, Kavli Foundation, and Schmidt Sciences. Blickhan is co-I of the Collective Wisdom project, which produced The Collective Wisdom Handbook, an authoritative book on the ‘state of the art’ in cultural heritage crowdsourcing, in 2021. She is currently leading development of the first-ever AI ethics framework for the Zooniverse platform and is also a co-PI of the recently funded “Communities in the Loop: AI for Cultures & Contexts in Multimodal Archives” project, a multi-institutional collaboration that aims to open the pages of the early African American press through combining community and AI-powered efforts. Dr. Blickhan holds a dual BA/BM in English literature and Voice Performance from the University of Iowa, a MSt in Musicology from Oxford University, and a PhD in Musicology from Royal Holloway, University of London.

Candidate Statement: I see ACH as a lodestar professional organization in its commitment to social justice, creativity, and high standards of research -- as well as in recognizing that these categories are not in opposition to one another. I appreciate how ACH has created space for those of us working in nontraditional humanities spaces, and if elected to serve I will work to continue these traditions, particularly around providing resources and professional development opportunities for GLAM workers, technologist-humanists, early career and independent scholars. I bring a range of collaborative, interdisciplinary experience as well as organizational, administrative, and strategic development skills that would make me a useful and effective colleague to the rest of the Council. I have profoundly benefited from participating in ACH conferences and professional development opportunities, and I see participation in the Executive Council as an opportunity to give back to a community that has taught me so much, and brought me into fellowship with many wonderful people. Now more than ever, we need strong professional organizations that rise to the moment, rather than retreating into isolation. ACH has been a leader in rapid response efforts, and continues to be a support system during times of great instability. I am proud to be a member, and would be proud to serve the community as a part of the Executive Council.

5. Laura Braunstein

Bio: Laura Braunstein is the Head of Digital Scholarly Engagement at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, where she leads three teams: Digital by Dartmouth Libraries, the Jones Media Center, and the Evans Map Room. She has been a library professional for over 25 years, working at the intersection of the humanities and digital technology. She is the co-editor of Digital Humanities in the Library (ACRL, 2015; 2nd edition, 2024), and has been published in Debates in the Digital Humanities (2024), #DLFTeach Toolkit (2019), Archive Journal (2018), DH+Lib (2017). She is also a widely published crossword constructor who advocates for diversity and inclusion in puzzles.

Candidate Statement: The material conditions that support and enable digital humanities work are at an inflection point. Academic funding for positions, programs, and centers is dwindling, despite student and scholarly engagement with digital culture at all levels. As well, while user interest in digitized cultural heritage is increasing, the traditional model of grants from public and private funders is in jeopardy. If DH has always been “in crisis,” we are now facing a political crisis of a different scale. I believe that ACH, in collaboration with other scholarly organizations, can advocate to maintain and improve our members’ working conditions during these times of constant crisis. As a humanities-oriented library leader with over 25 years of experience in scholarly organizations, I will serve on the Executive Council with the mission of helping ACH’s members negotiate changing times while remaining true to our values.

6. Lívia Clarete

Bio: Lívia Clarete is a researcher in computational linguistics and applied natural language processing. She holds a Master’s degree in Data Analysis and Visualization from the CUNY Graduate Center and has formal training in social science research methods. Her research combines traditional machine learning, large language models, and computational linguistic methods to analyze large-scale textual data. She works with multilingual corpora in Portuguese, Spanish, and English, focusing on how language is produced by online communities and how collective patterns emerge from unstructured text. Across academic and industry settings, Lívia has applied these methods to study different aspects of society. Her work includes analyzing the voice of patients to understand experiences and needs in healthcare and pharmaceutical contexts, examining public discourse around environmental and climate issues, and studying patterns in public opinion related to topics such as corruption and governance.

Candidate Statement: I’m interested in joining the ACH Executive Council as a way to be more actively involved in the community and to contribute to its ongoing work. ACH offers a space where interdisciplinary exchange is taken seriously, and being part of the Council would allow me to support that work in a more direct and sustained way. I see this role as an opportunity to both contribute and learn. I would like to help strengthen community engagement, support inclusive participation, and contribute to discussions about how computational methods are shared, evaluated, and sustained within the humanities. At the same time, serving on the Council would allow me to learn from others involved in shaping ACH’s direction and priorities.

7. Dr. Kay Coghill

Bio: Dr. KáLyn “Kay” Coghill is a dynamic and award-winning educator, activist, and practitioner who is an outspoken advocate specializing in online gender-based violence, particularly digital misogynoir. They are currently the Community Safety and Support Steward for Blacksky Algorithms, providing content moderation, research, and trust and safety services. Blacksky Algorithms builds open-source, community-driven infrastructure for decentralized social media. With their extensive background in working with Black women and non-binary people to create innovative harm reduction tactics online to combat issues like misogynoir, they seek to work diligently as a trust and safety steward for Blacksky to help mitigate the harms of anti-black harassment and misogynoir. Dr. Coghill addresses pressing issues not only through their research but also through digital content creation on topics such as misogynoir, race, technology, and the nuances of gender-based violence in the digital realm, particularly on social media platforms. They have a passion for protecting Black womxn and girls and dedicate their work to doing just that. Their mission is to continue to build communities online that are safe for Black people across the globe while also finding ways to protect them from harm in the process.

Candidate Statement: As a student member turned independent scholar member, the ACH was the first conference I ever presented at when I was a doctoral student back in 2021. The community has always been full of people who were resourceful and affirming. As someone who is not a traditional academic but finds community in this space, I want to be able to provide the same resources and affirmations I received during my journey and beyond. These moments have led me to keynoting and holding a week-long digital humanities workshop at the University of Guelph on digital misogynoir, advising students at schools like Carnegie Mellon on their grant projects focusing on toxic environments and restorative justice in the online gaming space, and most recently contributing insights for the Black Information Futures Symposium. I have been involved in many different groups that have allowed me to hone my leadership skills. I am on the board for my local abortion fund. I am the Associate Director for the Blackgirlhood Studies fellowship and also on the board for Justice for Black Girls and The Plunk Foundation. I have also been an adjunct instructor for a decade, creating unique courses that have engaged my students on topics focusing on race and the internet. Community organizing and being a scholar activist are a part of my foundation. I have taken my work and applied it to my role as the Community Safety and Support Steward for Blacksky Algorithms, combining research, policy creation, and harm reduction on decentralized social media networks such as Bluesky. Being on the executive council will allow me to put my interdisciplinary background to work, affirm others in the field, and build out our network of traditional and non-traditional scholars!

8. Jessica Dauterive

Bio: Jessica Dauterive is a digital public historian who specializes in the cultural politics of the US South. Her current project explores how the development of Cajun culture industries in the twentieth century shaped the identity of Southwest Louisiana by engaging with the opportunities mass culture presented for power, preservation, and profit. As the Program Manager at the Midlo Center for New Orleans Studies at the University of New Orleans, Dauterive leads digital humanities initiatives for the Center and teaches digital humanities and public history courses for the history department’s MA program. For the past decade, Dauterive has also worked as a digital humanities consultant for various local and national organizations including the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, the National Park Foundation, the New Orleans Jazz Museum, Xavier University of Louisiana, and most recently the ACE Mellon Humanities Postdoctoral Fellowship Program. She has published about her digital work in varied spaces, including the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Southern Cultures, and the Park Stewardship Forum. She is the managing editor of the place-based storytelling project New Orleans Historical and a project associate for the grassroots community archive Frenchmen Notes.

Candidate Statement: I am honored and excited to accept this nomination to join the ACH Executive Council. Digital humanities has shaped my path as a graduate student and now early career scholar. Throughout that time, I have been committed to building out DH projects that center the needs of the communities they serve. While having only attended the ACH conference once in person and once virtually, I was very inspired by the conversations it facilitated about how to create and support ethical and justice-oriented models for the field. In my position at the Midlo Center for New Orleans Studies, I am able to work with students, faculty, and community members to build digital capacity in the region. As an incubator of public humanities research in New Orleans, we frequently partner with local organizations working for economic, racial, and environmental justice by identifying the digital tools that can best support and amplify their work. As a digital humanities consultant,I have also been able to work with a wide range of partners across the country, most recently with the ACE Mellon Humanities Program that has hosted 31 postdoctoral fellows across the US and Guam. While fellows worked with their own partners in communities, historic sites, and public lands, I assisted with and learned from their varied models of collaborative digital work. All of this work has led me to develop a community-rooted approach to digital humanities that foregrounds the local in bigger national and global conversations. If elected, I would draw on these experiences of working at multiple scales and with various partners to expand and support ACH’s role in leading and advocating for new conversations that bring in the voices of scholars, students, and communities alike.

9. Mehulkumar Desai

Bio: I am a research scholar at Indian Institute of Technology (Indian School of Mines), Dhanbad. My research work is situated at the intersection of Electronic literature, Interactive Digital Narratives, Digital Humanities, and the creative industries. My research examines how born-digital literary forms, narrative interactivity, and computational creativity reshape contemporary cultural production, with particular attention to emergent practices in the Global South. Through an interdisciplinary approach that integrates literary studies, media theory, and digital humanities methodologies, I seek to advance both critical scholarship and creative praxis in digital narrative environments. To foster creativity, collaboration, and scholarly engagement in interactive digital narratives, I recently co-founded, along with Dr. Shanmugapriya, the Indian Consortium for Interactive Digital Narratives, an initiative dedicated to building research networks, supporting creative experimentation, and promoting pedagogical innovation in this evolving field. In parallel, I serve as a core committee member of Electronic Literature India, where I actively contribute to community building and the curation of electronic literature projects and creative works. My scholarly contributions include peer-reviewed publications in reputed academic journals, addressing themes such as electronic literature, digital storytelling, and humanities-led approaches to emerging technologies. I have also curated creative and practice-based works of electronic literature, bridging critical inquiry with artistic production. My professional affiliations include membership in the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) and Digital Humanities Alliance for Research and Teaching Innovations (DHARTI), reflecting my commitment to international and national digital humanities communities. In addition to research and creative practice, I am engaged in academic service and editorial work. I currently serve as Editor-at-Large for DHNow and have acted as Guest Editor for a Special issue titled, “Digital Futures: Archives, AI, and Access in Indian Digital Humanities” in the journal IJHAC, contributing to the dissemination of scholarship in Digital Humanities and specifically in Interactive Digital Narratives. Collectively, my work aims to strengthen interdisciplinary dialogue, expand access to digital literary practices, and contribute to the development of interactive digital narratives as a vibrant area of research and creative inquiry.

Candidate Statement: I seek to serve ACH with a strong commitment to advancing inclusive, interdisciplinary, and globally engaged digital humanities. My scholarly and creative work at the intersections of interactive digital narratives, electronic literature, digital humanities, and creative industries positions me to contribute a fresh perspective grounded in the Global South, one that foregrounds emerging practices, alternative knowledge systems, and context-sensitive modes of digital cultural production. Through my experience in research, creative curation, community building, and editorial service, I have worked to bridge theory and practice while fostering collaborative networks across academia and creative industries. If elected, I aim to support ACH’s core activities by strengthening international partnerships, amplifying underrepresented voices, and encouraging dialogue between scholars, artists, technologists, and practitioners. In particular, I hope to help expand ACH’s engagement with interactive and born-digital forms, creative industries frameworks, and computational creativity, recognizing these areas as vital to the future of humanities scholarship. I am especially interested in contributing to ACH initiatives related to conferences, publications, mentorship, and professional development, with a focus on building pathways for early-career researchers and creators from historically marginalized regions. By bringing perspectives shaped by Global South contexts and practice-based research, I seek to help ACH further its mission as a truly global intellectual community, one that values diversity of methods, cultures, and creative expression while advancing innovative approaches to digital humanities.

10. Laura Fretwell

Bio: Laura Fretwell is Assistant Professor of Digital and Public History at Florida Atlantic University. Her work explores the intersections of digital humanities, public history, and spatial theory with the histories of race, gender, memory in the American South. She earned her PhD in History from George Mason University, where she held fellowships with the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, the Centre for Contemporary and Digital History at the University of Luxembourg, and the Center for Humanities Research. She has also served as a digital and historical consultant for institutions including the National Park Service and the Smithsonian Institution. She teaches digital and public history and leads community workshops in oral history, digital methods, and content management systems.

Candidate Statement: Over the past seven years, the digital humanities community has shaped my development not only as a scholar and digital humanist, but also as a collaborator, thinker, and advocate for community engagement. Through my work at ADHO’s Digital Humanities conferences and my Digital History fellowship at the University of Luxembourg’s Centre for Contemporary and Digital History, I’ve gained a deepened understanding of cross‑regional and cross‑institutional collaboration, and I am eager to bring that experience and enthusiasm to ACH as an Executive Council Representative. I am currently directing the development of a digital history lab at a Hispanic‑Serving Institution, where I lead collaborative projects, guide grant applications, and teach courses and workshops designed to build capacity for digital inquiry and inclusive digital storytelling. My goal is to create a space where scholarly and public collaborators can engage digital tools to ask critical humanities questions. For the past five years, I have also served as a digital consultant for public and community organizations, including African American communities marginalized by historical inequities. This work reinforces my commitment to democratizing history, elevating marginalized voices, and producing innovative historical scholarship through digital means. Across my teaching, consulting, and lab‑building efforts, I prioritize training others to be critical consumers and creators of information, integrating ethics of care into data and AI practices, and fostering responsible, community‑oriented digital scholarship. If elected to the ACH Executive Council, I will advocate for expanded access to open‑source tools and training, support anti‑racist and justice‑focused DH projects, and help ACH engage more deeply with urgent questions about the ethics, accessibility, and sustainability of emerging technologies, including AI and other data infrastructures.

11. Estelle Guéville

Bio: I am a historian and digital humanist specializing in medieval manuscript cultures, women religious, and computational approaches to textual artefacts. I am currently pursuing my PhD at Yale University, am Associate Researcher at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and Visiting Researcher at the LaMOP (Université Paris 1). My doctoral research reconstructs the first large-scale dataset of female scribal production in Christian Europe before 1600, integrating codicology, paleography, and computational analysis to illuminate the scribal agency, literacy, devotional and liturgical contributions of premodern women. I am also the co-director of the Paris Bible Project and am co-author of the forthcoming book "Medieval Manuscripts and the Computational Humanities: Big Data, Scribes, and the “Paris Bible.”" More broadly, my work advances data-driven approaches to medieval book cultures and the creation of open, interoperable resources for the study of premodern textuality.

Candidate Statement: If elected to the ACH Executive Council, I would be committed to strengthening ACH as an inclusive, supportive, and intellectually vibrant community for digital humanists across career stages and institutional contexts. In particular, I am invested in ensuring that graduate students, early-career scholars, and practitioners from the GLAM sector feel fully represented, supported, and empowered within the organization. I would actively contribute to existing ACH initiatives, including the annual conference and member-facing activities, while also helping to develop new forms of support focused on mentoring, networking, and skills-sharing. These might include structured mentorship opportunities, spaces for peer-to-peer exchange, and programming that addresses both technical and professional development needs within digital humanities. I am particularly committed to supporting equitable access to digital humanities training, resources, and professional opportunities, especially for students, contingent scholars, and practitioners working outside well-resourced institutions. Drawing on my experience working across museums, libraries, and research institutions in Europe, the Middle East, and the United States, I am also interested in fostering stronger connections between Digital Humanities and Public Humanities across continents, as well as in supporting digital initiatives in premodern fields. I see ACH as a key space for building collaborations that cross institutional, national, and professional boundaries, and for supporting forms of DH work that are collaborative, public-facing, and sustainable. I would be honored to support ACH’s ongoing work in service of its members.

12. Jing Han

Bio: Jing Han is the Digital Scholarship Librarian at the University of California, Riverside. She leads initiatives in digital scholarship and scholarly communication, including the Digital Scholarship Certificate, the Open Research and Creative Activities Forum, The Reference Desk podcast, and expanded Open Access Week programming. She serves as UCR’s eScholarship (institutional repository) Liaison with the California Digital Library. Jing currently serves as Divisional Chair of the Research & Professional Development Committee for the Librarians Association of the University of California (LAUC), Treasurer of California Academic & Research Libraries (CARL), and a member of the CARL Conference Planning Committee. She is also a member of the UC Scholarly Communication and Digital Humanities Common Knowledge Groups and the Code4Lib Community Support Squad (CSS). She holds a PhD in Media and Communication with a research focus on computational text analysis from Temple University.

Candidate Statement: I am excited to stand for election as an Executive Council Representative and to contribute more actively to the ACH community. My work centers on building collaborative, sustainable ecosystems that connect research, infrastructure, and community engagement. Through leadership roles in LAUC and CARL, conference planning, and community service initiatives, I have worked to strengthen professional networks, support emerging practitioners, and expand access to scholarly resources. If elected, I would prioritize community visibility, inclusive participation for early-career scholars, and support for open, sustainable scholarly infrastructure. I am committed to contributing thoughtfully and collaboratively to ACH’s continued growth and impact. Thank you for your consideration!

13. Amanda Hartman

Bio: Mandy Hartman is a software engineer and information professional whose work bridges software development and cultural heritage. Drawing on over a decade of experience in institutional and private collections, she builds accessible, searchable digital platforms for museums, archives, and universities. She has led development of multiple grant-funded digital archive initiatives, including projects at the Asheville Art Museum (CLIR) and Penland School of Craft (NEH), and built the Black Mountain College Yearbook, a digital archive later sold to the Black Mountain College Museum & Art Center.

Candidate Statement: I worked for nearly a decade in museums and archives before moving into software development. That time included digitizing collections, managing grants, and building metadata standards. Working across collections and code has shaped how I approach digital projects and consider end users. A project that I am particularly proud of is the Black Mountain College Yearbook, a digital archive I developed and later sold to the Black Mountain College Museum & Art Center. I'm drawn to ACH because it supports practitioners across roles and disciplines, not just faculty, but librarians, staff, and independent scholars. If elected, I’d bring a builder’s perspective to the council. I hope to contribute to ACH’s work supporting the broad community of people doing this work, wherever they sit.

14. Hilary Havens

Bio: Hilary Havens is Associate Professor of English and the founder and Chair of the Digital Humanities Interdisciplinary Program at the University of Tennessee, which offers both an undergraduate minor and a graduate certificate program in Digital Humanities. She is one of the editors of the Maria Edgeworth Letters Project (MELP | https://mariaedgeworth.org/), an open-access archive containing the correspondence of the Anglo-Irish Regency author Maria Edgeworth. MELP features over 250 of Edgeworth’s letters transcribed by volunteers using the Zooniverse platform and encoded in TEI. It is supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities with the ultimate goal of publishing the remaining 3,000+ letters using minimal metadata standards. Hilary is also the author of Revising the Eighteenth-Century Novel: Authorship from Manuscript to Print (Cambridge UP, 2019), and the editor of Didactic Novels and British Women’s Writing, 1790-1820 (Routledge, 2017). Her co-edited edition of Samuel Richardson and Edward Young’s correspondence and her edition of Frances Burney’s Cecilia are forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.

Candidate Statement: Ever since I arrived at the University of Tennessee in 2014, I have been working towards building a robust Digital Humanities program and community in Knoxville. I have helped UT grow from a small community of scholars to a thriving graduate and undergraduate program. We have several visiting speakers and send at least 5 people to DHSI every year. We also have internal fellowships that provide expert assistance with digital projects. I am working on building an internship program and coordinating with initiatives in digital games, but I have so much to learn from members of the executive council and the ACH community. I believe that DH is an essential way of engaging both with cultural criticism and new technologies – allowing the humanities to retain a seat at the table, even (or especially) with the rise of AI, while providing a space for marginalized voices that is not usually available in traditional (print) forums. I would be able to participate in this important work through the ACH executive council. Thank you for your consideration.

15. Jessie McCarty

Bio: Jessie McCarty is a multi-published, multi-certified information science professional, specializing in the l intersections of metadata, publishing, and digital asset management for the humanities. Jessie holds a BFA in Creative Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and maintains certifications in systems migration and rare book cataloging (DCRMB). They are an incoming MLIS student in Information Management, with a specialization in bilingual metadata practices for large-scale asset libraries. With over three years of experience working across content systems and cataloging standards, Jessie brings a poet’s precision to organizing information across industries. Since 2022, they have supported theatrical productions, digital archives, education technologies, and auction platforms by applying qualitative research methodologies and structured inventory systems to their assets.

Candidate Statement: Hello, I am Jessie McCarty, and I am honored to be considered for the Executive Council Representative role at ACH. I look forward to serving as an advocate for the LIS and MLIS communities by fostering critical conversations around cataloging practices, metadata ethics, and bilingual taxonomy development across our database platforms. My work intersects the digital humanities and information systems, and I am committed to advancing equitable, interoperable, and sustainable metadata frameworks. If elected, I will prioritize collaborative dialogue, technical transparency, and inclusive open-source standard development to ensure our archival systems reflect the communities they serve. Digital humanities is not only an academic interest for me, but it is a guiding framework for how I approach organization and knowledge sharing. I would be honored to contribute that perspective during this term as an Executive Council Representative. I would be thrilled to commit to the 4-5 tasks that are responsible in this role and to representing the ACH at conferences. I have spoken for folk-metadata practices at the 2024 Queer Bibliography Conference for the California Rare Book School, the IIIF Open Meeting 2026, and the 2026 Digital Conference at the Digital Repository of Ireland in June 2026.

16. Danielle R. Mehlman-Brightwell, PhD

Bio: Dr. Danielle R. Mehlman-Brightwell is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Communication and Director of the Office of Community Outreach at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg. She teaches courses in argument, interpersonal communication, rhetoric and public policy, policy practicum, theories of persuasion, and public speaking, and serves as public policy major advisor. She earned her Ph.D. in Communications Media and Instructional Technology from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on political communication, digital media, public opinion, and technology policy. She has published in the Journal of Communication Technology and the International Journal of Communication, examining how digital media environments shape civic engagement, polarization, news credibility, and concerns about foreign interference in elections. Dr. Mehlman-Brightwell serves as a faculty affiliate in quantitative analysis for the Center for Applied Research at Pitt-Greensburg and is a member of the Pitt Disinformation Lab at the University of Pittsburgh’s Institute for Cyber Law, Policy, and Security. Her work bridges communication, technology, and public policy, with a strong commitment to mentorship, interdisciplinary collaboration, and community-engaged scholarship.

Candidate Statement: I am honored to stand for election to the ACH Executive Council. As a scholar whose work sits at the intersection of communication, technology, and public life, I am deeply aligned with ACH’s mission to support digital humanities research and cultivate a vibrant professional community through conferences, publications, and outreach. I am particularly drawn to ACH’s recognition that digital humanities work is inherently sociopolitical. My research on digital media, polarization, and information ecosystems reflects a commitment to understanding—and improving—the technological structures that shape democratic discourse. I believe ACH plays a vital role in advocating for thoughtful, socially engaged uses of computing in the study of humanistic questions. If elected, I would work to expand mentorship opportunities, strengthen pathways for emerging and institutionally diverse scholars, and promote open-access and open-source initiatives that broaden participation in digital humanities work. I am especially interested in supporting programming and outreach that connect research, pedagogy, and public engagement, ensuring that digital humanities scholarship remains accessible and impactful. I value collaborative governance, transparency, and inclusive leadership. I would be grateful for the opportunity to help shape ACH’s priorities in ways that support its members and advance community-centered digital humanities practice.

17. Arjun Sabharwal

Bio: Arjun Sabharwal joined the University of Toledo Libraries faculty as Digital Initiatives Librarian in January 2009. His areas of responsibilities include digitizing manuscript collections and archival records and developing virtual exhibitions at the Ward M. Canaday Center for Special Collections, managing the University of Toledo Digital Repository, and curating the Toledo's Attic Virtual Museum [Archived Site] Since 2017, he has also been the system administrator and lead technical contact for the Open Journal Systems, which houses several Open Access journals at the University of Toledo. He is the selector for the following disciplines: Geography and Planning, Music, Political Science and Public Administration, and Hungarian Literature/Language. He also oversees the collections for the Margaret M. Papp Perry Memorial Hungarian Culture Endowment Collection. His research interests include Digital Humanities, interdisciplinary approaches to digital curation, digital preservation, archival science, information architecture, data visualization, artificial intelligence, and multimodal literacy. He is the author of Digital Curation in the Digital Humanities: Preserving and Promoting Archival and Special Collections (Oxford, UK: Chandos Publishing, 2015) and has authored and co-authored several research articles and chapters.

Candidate Statement: As a professor and digital initiatives librarian at the University of Toledo Libraries, I am interested in serving the DH community. I approached digital curation practice from a DH angle as well as archiving and librarianship. My LibGuide serves to support DH scholarship. I have presented on DH-related topics at several conferences, and published a book titled Digital Curation in the Digital Humanities and numerous articles and chapters. I lead digital projects, manage our digital repository, and curate a local history virtual museum and public DH project called Toledo’s Attic. It also serves students and teachers participating in National History Day competitions. As co-chair of the Northwest Ohio Cultural Heritage Group, I continue to bring interest in DH to participants representing the region’s heritage institutions. I have reviewed several submissions for ACH and ADHO presentations and completed book reviews for ALA on various DH topics. With GenAI on the scene, I am seeking opportunities to extend my interest in DH towards AI. I recently presented at a Library Journal conference on AI affecting archives and DH and am currently preparing a manuscript on AI impacting historical research and digital curation. As our university’s AI Fellow and co-chair of the AI Task Force, and previously the chair of the AI Subcommittee for Research, I follow AI trends impacting higher education and have collaborated on drafting recommendations on the responsible use of AI towards institutional implementation. I recently assembled an Arts and Humanities Subcommittee to represent creative disciplines in the conversation on AI. As the University Libraries’ Inclusion Officer and Chair of the DEI committee, I focused on enriching our services and collections. If elected to serve on ACH’s Executive Council for the upcoming 4-year term, I will bring my dedication to DH and diversity to support the mission of the ACH.

18. Rachel Starry

Bio: Rachel Starry (she/her) is the Head of Digital Scholarship & Publishing 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 as peer reviewer for several DH publications, 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 my expertise in conducting and supporting digital humanities projects, my passion for supporting students and early-career scholars, and a commitment to centering issues of justice and accessibility in the work of this organization.

19. Serenity Sutherland

Bio: Serenity Sutherland is associate professor of Communication Studies and Gender & Women's Studies at SUNY Oswego where she teaches undergraduate and graduate students. She received her PhD in History from the University of Rochester. Her research expertise includes the history of gender in science and technology, the digital humanities, and media studies. Published digital humanities works that combine these interests include a digital edition of the papers of chemist Ellen Swallow Richards, the first woman to attend MIT and to teach there, and a co-authored network visualization project “Visualizing Women in Science at the American Philosophical Society." Dr. Sutherland is also finalizing her biography of Ellen Swallow Richards for publication at the University of Massachusetts Press.

Candidate Statement: I am interested in serving on the ACH executive committee to help sustain both scholarship and scholars in the digital humanities. It is neither a stretch nor alarmist to say that in a time of increased political attacks on social institutions and higher education, loss of funding for important digital projects, and the erosion of civic values, one small measure of resistance we have is by joining with each other. For this reason, I am committed to serving on ACH executive council to help strengthen the ties between scholars working in diverse disciplines and methodologies. My goals on the executive council beyond representing the membership and the organization will be to support programming and initiatives focused on helping ACH and its members produce meaningful, scholarly digital and computational work. I have experience leading organizations with a three-year presidential cycle at the Association for Documentary Editing, serving on the board of the journal Scholarly Editing, and serving as PI on digital projects. I'm committed to equitable labor and look forward to the opportunity to collaborate with other ACH leadership and members. I strongly identify with the ACH's mission statement that holds a capacious view of DH scholarship, and this is represented in the type of published works and projects I've contributed to: including pedagogical materials, network visualizations, digital publishing cooperatives, online curation and scholarly digital publication. I've worked both inside and outside of academia, I am a first-generation student/academic, and I believe in the power of working with other board members and ACH members to sustain our community. As always, our work in DH remains sociopolitical and my goal is to serve the ACH community with a fresh point of view that combines good humor with a frank assessment of troubling realities and a sustaining hope for the future. Thank you for your consideration.

20. Steven Teasdale

Bio: Steven Teasdale is currently a part-time research associate with the Istituto Storico Germanico di Roma where he is involved in the development of an online database on Genoese merchant networks and the slave trade between the Mediterranean Sea and Atlantic Ocean. His research combines detailed archival analysis with digital methodologies to investigate the socioeconomic world of slaveholders and the enslaved in the Mediterranean world from 1300 to 1550. He has authored papers on Genoese merchant activity in the Atlantic and North African regions during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and has created an online portal (built upon Omeka-S and modeled with CIDOC-CRM) that has encoded thousands of historical documents related to premodern Mediterranean slavery. This database maps the socioeconomic networks of thousands of slaveholders and enslaved persons attested in Genoese notarial contracts enacted during the late medieval and early modern periods. He is particularly interested in the possibilities of using digital humanities to reveal aspects of the social world of enslaved persons in the Mediterranean, a population that has been largely marginalized in traditional scholarship. Steven has previously worked with the University of Genoa and received his PhD from the Department of History from the University of Toronto.

Candidate Statement: None provided

21. Carmen Thong

Bio: Carmen Thong (she/her) is a researcher in cultural analytics, postcolonial studies, and sociology of literature in the English Department at Stanford University. She is a Core Research Member at the Stanford Literary Lab, an affiliate of the Stanford Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis, and ran the Stanford Humanities Center workshop, “Colonialism, Post-, and Anti- in the Digital Age” (CPADA), which is now a colloquy on Stanford Arcade. She is also co-editor and co-author of UNESCO’s The African Book Industry. Her computational literary work is published with venues such as Modern Language Quarterly, Digital Humanities Quarterly, and Medical Humanities. Her current projects focus on infrastructural constraints for postcolonial digital humanities.

Candidate Statement: I am honored to be nominated to stand for election as an Executive Council Representative. As a researcher working at the intersection of postcolonial studies and digital humanities, I hope to contribute to ACH’s long-standing commitment to widen participation in digital humanities by supporting collaborations across geographic and field boundaries. As the organizer of digital humanities initiatives such as the interdisciplinary and grant-funded research workshop entitled “Colonialism, Post, and Anti, in the Digital Age,” along with a few stray years in strategy and business management in telecommunications, I bring field-building and project management experience, and a commitment to supporting global and postcolonial approaches across the many communities that make up DH.

22. Archana Venkatesh

Bio: Archana (Arch) Venkatesh (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of History at Clemson University. She is a historian of gender and modern South Asia, with a focus on medical history. Her work on the history of women doctors in India is under contract with McGill University Press. In addition to her work in South Asian Studies, she has published in oral history, and has been doing oral history for over a decade – both as a practitioner and as an instructor. She is looking forward to working to expand DH applications in diverse fields, particularly South Asian history and history of migration.

Candidate Statement: I am honored to be nominated to the ACH Executive Council. I am excited to explore the new directions in digital humanities, which I see as an important tool in democratizing scholarly inquiry. In my work, I am committed to uncovering and sharing the grassroots or subaltern narratives in history, and digital tools have been crucial to this process. I have worked over the past decade with oral history data, and I am eager to continue to expand the reach of the historical narrative to include underrepresented communities – both in the US and globally. I am looking forward to serving as the co-Tech chair for the forthcoming ACH conference. If elected to the Council, I would help further the mission of the ACH, and bring my own experiences working with oral history data in diverse communities to bear on the new direction the digital humanities is taking. I am especially invested in the need to be mindful towards the humanity of our endeavors in DH, especially in an era where technological and other forces seem intent on ignoring it. It is more important than ever to sustain a duty of care in our work. I look forward to working with scholars and practitioners from a variety of fields to harness the potential of DH and computational tools to build community rather than sow discord.