Digital Humanities Summer Fellowships
The Simpson Center offers annual summer fellowships for faculty and graduate students to pursue research projects that use digital technologies in innovative and intensive ways and/or explore the historical, social, aesthetic, and cross-cultural implications of digital cultures. The program has three primary goals:
- To animate knowledge—using rich media, dynamic databases, and visualization tools
- To circulate knowledge—among diverse publics
- To understand digital culture—historically, theoretically, aesthetically, and generatively
The Simpson Center gratefully acknowledges the support of a National Endowment for the Humanities Challenge Grant and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation as well as many donors to the endowment which is underwriting these fellowships.
2025 - 2026 Digital Humanities Summer Fellows
2023 - 2024 Digital Humanities Summer Fellow
Melanie Walsh (she/her/hers)
When Postwar American Fiction Went Viral: Protest, Profit, and Popular Readers in the 21st Century
In my book, When Postwar American Fiction Went Viral: Protest, Profit, and Popular Readers in the 21st Century, I trace how postwar literary texts by writers like James Baldwin, Kurt Vonnegut, Sandra Cisneros, and Chris Kraus have been recirculated and reimagined by various internet communities and political movements, such as Black Lives Matter. By drawing on both humanistic and computational methods, both interviews and data, I narrate a new chapter in the history of reading spurred by the internet and social media.