Kathryn Tomasek on Historians and Digital Scholarship

05/02/19 • 25 min

In the fall of 2018, Wheaton College historian Kathryn Tomasek made a visit to Indiana University, Bloomington, as a guest of IU’s Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities. AHR Interview producer Daniel Story sat down with her in front of a live audience to discuss historians and digital scholarship. Kathryn Tomasek is Professor of History at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts, where she teaches nineteenth-century U.S. history, women’s history, and digital history, and is a founding director of the Wheaton College Digital History Project. She has written extensively on both women’s history and digital history and methodology and served as a member of the American Historical Association’s ad hoc Committee on the Professional Evaluation of Digital Publications by Historians. Her current focus includes an ongoing collaborative project to TEI encode historical financial records.

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Kathryn Olivarius on Her Article “Immunity, Capital, and Power in Antebellum New Orleans”

In this episode, editor Alex Lichtenstein speaks with Kathryn Olivarius, whose article, “Immunity, Capital, and Power in Antebellum New Orleans,” appears in the April 2019 issue of the AHR. Olivarius is Assistant Professor of History at Stanford University where she focuses on the antebellum South, Greater Caribbean, slavery, and disease. Her book, Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom, is forthcoming from Harvard University Press.

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Robert Greene on His Film "Bisbee '17"

In this episode, AHR editor Alex Lichtenstein speaks with filmmaker Robert Greene about his 2018 film “Bisbee ’17.” In it Greene examines the complex and troubled history of Bisbee, Arizona, a mining town located near the state’s southern border. The film’s central focus is the 1917 illegal removal of more than a thousand striking mine works, and many of their local supporters, by the mining company Phelps Dodge—a scarring event now known simply as the “Bisbee Deportation.” Greene went about the examination, in part, by involving present-day residents of the town in reenacting key aspects of the deportation event, an innovation that effectively transforms the film from a straightforward historical documentary into a far more complex examination of history, memory, and memorialization. Greene’s other critically-acclaimed films include the Gotham Awards-nominated “Actress” (2014), “Fake It So Real” (2011), and “Kati With An I” (2010). He currently serves as Filmmaker-in-Chief at the Murray Center for Documentary Journalism at the University of Missouri. “Bisbee ’17” is the subject of an AHR roundtable titled “Re-creating the ‘Bisbee Deportation’ on Film,” which appears in the June 2019 issue.