DIGITAL HUMANITIES IS A GAME-CHANGER FOR SCHOLARS AND STUDENTS
New Torero alumna Emily Bezold has fond memories of her undergraduate student experience, but one decision she made early on at USD will forever be a personal “aha” moment.
Bezold was a student assistant dramaturg for the Tudor Plays Project, an ongoing interdisciplinary Digital Humanities project run by USD Assistant Professor of English Maura Giles-Watson. The project develops and publishes new digital resources for the study and performance of early and mid-Tudor plays, chiefly those written and performed in noble households and at the court during the reign of Henry VIII. The resources, according to Giles-Watson, are to provide students, historians, theater practitioners and scholars of literature and drama with free web-based tools for the study of pre-Elizabethan secular drama in England.
Bezold’s exposure to the project was a tremendous growing experience. “Working on the Tudor Plays Project with Maura gave me a lot of confidence in myself,” says Bezold ‘17, an Honors Program student. “It really got me out of my comfort zone, got me into a place to meet new people, engage with them, gain confidence in my intellectual abilities and to be part of a team.”
Serving as a Medieval and Renaissance studies fellow and learning multiple computer programming methods under the tutelage of Paul Evans, the USD Humanities Center’s first postdoctoral fellow in Digital Humanities, all led to Bezold’s newest step — beginning an English Literature master’s degree program at Georgetown University this fall. “The field of Digital Humanities is rapidly changing the way scholars and students in the humanities perform and present their research,” Giles-Watson stated when the Tudor Plays Project used USD student researchers in 2014.
“DH offers new opportunities for students to participate meaningfully in humanities research projects, to collaborate with faculty members, and to work with peers from a range of disciplines. It allows students to practice and master skills that are transferable to careers in high-tech and humanistic fields as well as in business. DH itself is a growing area of employment in universities, where computer programmers and humanists work together to create new projects.”
Evans says undergraduate students’ Digital Humanities opportunities will only grow.
“People typically encounter DH at the graduate level for the first time, but we’ve had considerable success teaching undergrads. We’ve had two students get into graduate schools based on their Digital Humanities experiences [Bezold and Yasmine Hachimi ‘14].”
A valuable new asset is the DH Studio space in the USD Humanities Center, which opened in Serra Hall in October 2016. “The center balances traditional and new approaches to the Humanities. We don’t elevate one above the other; we foster the growth of both,” says College of Arts and Science Dean Noelle Norton, PhD.
Funding for the center’s creation came by way of a generous donation by Carol Vassiliadis. A recent $250,000 funding award from the W.M. Keck Foundation will launch the Keck Undergraduate Humanities Research Fellows Program and develop new collaborations between humanities and other USD academic areas. There’s funding that will help to support a full-time DH postdoctoral scholar to teach DH courses and build DH capacity on campus.
“Work in Digital Humanities is an integral part of USD’s Humanities Center and, under the dedicated leadership of Maura Giles-Watson and Paul Evans, it’s already engaged the keen interest of students and faculty,” says Director Brian Clack. “We’re all delighted that the DH element of the Humanities Center is so very vibrant, and are hugely excited to see how its influence and reputation will grow, on campus and nationwide.”
The study and performance of plays written during the reign of Henry VIII (pictured above in the painting, Henry VIII and the Barber Surgeons, by Hans Holbein) are among the interdisciplinary projects that place USD’s Digital Humanities Center at center stage.
Leave a Reply