About the Center
About the Center
Development for USM’s Center for Digital Humanities (CDH) began in November 2019. Dr. Susannah J. Ural, former Assistant Professor of History at USM, led this effort based on her scholarly expertise and her role developing USM’s Dale Center for the Study of War & Society in 2014. Dr. Ural and digital liaison, Dr. Stephanie Seal Walters, spent the next two years working with partners in the region, across campus, and in the School of Humanities building a Center that would support existing faculty work in digital humanities, expand 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.
Since its founding, the Center has had 20 interdisciplinary faculty working across campus and collaborating on DH projects and grants. 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 benefits from strong relationships with partners across the region including the Mississippi Department of Archives and History and the Mississippi Digital Library.
The Center is overseen by Dr. Andrew Haley, Interim Director of the Center for the 2023-2024 academic year, and Dr. Patrick Hoehne, Assistant Professor of History and Digital Humanities.
“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, Former Director of the Center for Digital Humanities and Professor of History