Introducing This Year’s IASH Digital Scholarship Fellows
The Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities has awarded two Digital Scholarship Visiting Research Fellowships and the Digital Scholarship Postdoctoral Fellowship for the 2019-2020 academic year. These scholarships are partly funded by the Centre for Data, Culture and Society.
This year’s Visiting Research Fellows are Mikki Brock, whose home institution is Washington and Lee University, Virginia; and Colin Johnson of the University of Kent. This year’s Postdoctoral Fellowship has been awarded to Alice Kelly.
Mikki Brock’s fellowship project is titled ‘Mapping the Scottish Reformation’, a database and mapping investigation exploring the lives, movements, and networks of the Scottish clergy between 1560 and 1689. As Associate Professor of British History at Washington and Lee University, her research interests centre on religious belief and identity in early modern Scotland, as well the history of the supernatural. Mikki is the author of Satan and the Scots: The Devil in Post-Reformation Scotland, c.1560-1700 (Routledge, 2016) and co-editor of Knowing Demons, Knowing Spirits in the Early Modern Period (Palgrave, 2018). Mikki is also working on a second project, ’For Covenant and Community: Religious Life in a Scottish Town’, a study of Ayr in southwest Scotland during the remarkable tenure of minister William Adair (1639- 1682).
During his fellowship, Colin Johnson will be working on a book project analysing the use of AI in the visual arts. Colin is a reader in the School of Computing at the University of Kent, whose research interests centre on artificial intelligence and creative intelligence. Colin’s work has focused on improving AI algorithms and the kinds of problems that AI can tackle, the use of AI in music, mathematics, engineering, bioinformatics, and the digital humanities. Colin’s fellowship will be concerned primarily with exploring the complex role of AI in creativity and art, in particular questions around whether AI can be seen as a sophisticated medium or as an active collaborator with artists, or something in-between.
Alice Kelly’s doctoral research focused on Joseph Conrad's female characters. During her PhD, she identified overlapping resonances with characters in contemporary popular film, which started off her interest in studying fan fiction. Tracing Conrad’s characters as they materialised in the visual media that accompanied or followed his novels, Alice conceptualised the intertextual and extratextual components of adaptation, and the reading strategies that bring queer subtexts to light. Alice’s postdoctoral research positions femslash (female-female) fan fiction within the history of lesbian literary adaptation, arguing that queer survival literature of the digital age subversively plays with the mainstream, popular, transmedia source texts that inspire it, to create narratives of queer domesticity. Alice is developing on these themes during her IASH fellowship under the mentorship of Dr Benjamin Bateman.
Over the course of the academic year, all three fellows will be sharing their work with audiences by presenting seminar talks. Colin Johnson will present on ‘Artificial Intelligence as an Artistic Medium’ on Wednesday 27 November at 4PM in the Digital Scholarship Centre [register to attend]. Mikki Brock and Alice Kelly will present CDCS seminar talks in early 2020.