About the Center
Development on USM’s Center for Digital Humanities (DH) began in November 2019. USM
asked the digital and military historian, Dr. Susannah J. Ural, to lead this effort
based on her scholarly expertise and her role in the successful multi-million campaign
that launched USM’s world-renowned Dale Center for the Study of War & Society in 2014.
Working with partners in the region, across campus, and in the School of Humanities,
the USM DH team led by Ural and digital liaison, Dr. Stephanie Seal Walters, spent
the next two years building a Center that would support existing faculty work in digital
humanities (DH), expand current course offerings, add a new tenure-track professorship
in digital humanities, and promote USM as a DH hub throughout the region. The USM
Center for Digital Humanities launched two years later in November 2021.
Today, the Center for DH is directed by Ural, working in close partnership with Dr.
Liz Polcha, Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities and English. There are several
course offerings for undergraduates (HIS306, ENG365, HUM402) and graduate students
(HUM501 and HUM502), as well as opportunities to work in DH internships. The Center
for DH includes about 20 interdisciplinary faculty working across campus and collaborating
on DH projects and grants. The team also benefits from strong relationships with partners
across the region including the Mississippi Department of Archives and History and
the Mississippi Digital Library.
“At an R-1 institution like USM, digital humanities isn’t just about faculty research. It’s about collaborating on that work with our students. DH offers students the chance to experiment, learn, and reflect on how computational methods are implemented both in humanistic research and in their daily lives, and it provides students with experiences that make them highly marketable to employers."
Dr. Susannah J. Ural, Director of the Center for Digital Humanities and Professor of History.