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
2015 - 2016 Digital Humanities Summer Fellow
Tad Hirsch (he/him/his)
AR-15: Field Stripping America's Rifle
This project critically examines contemporary gun culture in the United States by analyzing representations of the AR-15 semi-automatic rifle on social and popular media. By exploring the meanings and uses of so-called “assault weapons” through the eyes of their enthusiasts, this work challenges assumptions on both sides of the gun control debate, and provides a nuanced, empirically-grounded basis for future policy discussions.