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
K. Mehmet Kentel (he/him/his)
Cosmopolitanism on the ‘Fields of Dead’: Infrastructure, Spatial Change and Expert Knowledge in the Making of Pera, 1857-1880
This dissertation is a microhistory of the making of one of the most famous cosmopolitan enclaves within the Ottoman Empire, the late nineteenth-century Pera, focusing on the links between material infrastructure and urban culture. It aims at mapping (1) the networks of financial and political influence in the shaping of transportation infrastructure; (2) the transformation of the urban spaces tied to the change in infrastructure; (3) the intellectual landscape of expertise behind this process. The digital mapping will integrate the diachronic change of the spaces of Pera between 1857 and 1880, to the working of the synchronic networks of power and economic influence in the making of those spaces.