Digital Humanities Summer Fellowships

scholars in the fellowship program having a lively discussion at the conference table

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.

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Cohort Archives

2026 - 2027 Digital Humanities Summer Fellows

Mal Ahern looks at a roll of film that has been unwound.
Assistant Professor
Cinema & Media Studies
Ashfaq Ahmed
PhD Candidate
Jackson School of International Studies
Vanessa de Veritch Woodside
Associate Professor
School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences, UW Tacoma
Andrew Hedding
Assistant Professor
Linguistics
Meichun Liu
Assistant Professor
School of Art + Art History + Design
Nikoloz Nadirashvili
PhD Candidate
School of Art + Art History + Design
Paul Jason Perez
PhD Candidate
Information School
Zhifan Sheng
PhD Candidate
Asian Languages & Literature
Jingrui Yan
PhD Candidate
Cinema & Media Studies

2022 - 2023 Digital Humanities Summer Fellow

A black and white portrait of Sarah Choi.

Sarah Choi (she/her/hers)

Doctoral Student

Playing with Past, Present, Future: How Eye Filmmuseum’s Orphan “Bits & Pieces” Can  Reinvigorate Cinema and Media Studies

Increased access to orphan-film repositories such as Eye Filmmuseum’s Bits and Pieces allows both artists and scholars to find new meanings in and through these forgotten visual records of the past. Engaging with such archival materials to create found-footage films is not only theoretically stimulating with questions of cinematic ontology, but also pedagogically valuable as they challenge what film historian Katherine Groo calls, “the stasis of film history.” This project is interested in how these once-neglected films can be woven into the spatiotemporal fabrics of today, imagining new possibilities of teaching orphan and found-footage films at the undergraduate level.