2021-22 Digital Humanities Teaching Fellows Test New Ways to Engage

The UWM Digital Humanities Teaching Fellows for 2021-22 are Rachel Baum (Foreign Languages & Literature), Lisa Hager (English), and Aragorn Quinn (Foreign Languages & Literature).

photo of Rachel Baum
Rachel Baum
photo of Lisa Hager
Lisa Hager

The Teaching Fellows Award, administered by the UWM Libraries, provides an incentive for faculty, instructors, and teaching assistants to share innovative classroom assignments that integrate digital humanities tools and methods.

This year’s projects are

  • Rachel Baum: “Increasing Student Engagement Through Wakelet Curation: Representing the Holocaust in Words and Images Using Wakelet” for Jewish Sudies 261: Representing the Holocaust.
  • Lisa Hager: “Literary Mythbusting & Jane Eyre Project: Hypothes.is Annotations & Essay Assignment” for English 279: Women Writers.
  • Aragorn Quinn: “Close Reading and Interpretation Using Video Games” for Japanese 100: Introduction to Japanese Literature.

“This is our fourth DH Teaching Fellows cohort,” says UWM Libraries’ Digital Librarian Ann Hanlon, who co-facilitates the program with Kate Ganski, assistant director of libraries for User Services. “A big takeaway for me from the first three cohorts is that our success has been defined by a willingness on the part of these instructors to try something new, and then to chart that path together.”

Hanlon says that the program has excelled at creating space for participants to experiment and reflect together on the often-surprising outcomes of introducing digital technology and multi-media assignments where before there was simply a term paper.

As part of their fellowship, the awardees create shared documentation to describe their assignments and participate in a public panel discussion in the spring about DH and teaching, focused on their classroom experience.