The Critical Digital Humanities Initiative (CDHI), a strategic initiative of the University of Toronto, is thrilled to announce our CDHI Postdoctoral Fellows in Community Data (2022-24): Dr. Rachel Corbman and Katie Mackinnon.
The CDHI Postdoctoral Fellows in Community Data is an interdisciplinary program, with one fellow affiliated with University of Toronto Scarborough and one affiliated with the Faculty of Information. The program focuses on projects that enact equitable, future-focused strategies of preserving data related to the histories of people of colour, Indigenous peoples, and queer, disabled, or other communities whose work, experiences, and perspectives have been insufficiently recognized or inequitably attended to in historical records. The fellowship is part of the Council of Library and Information Resources (CLIR) Community Data program. This new two-year postdoctoral fellowship program contributes to CDHI’s vision of forging a new paradigm of critical digital humanities scholarship and bringing together the humanities’ critique of power in historical perspectives with digital tools for socially transformative research.
Rachel Corbman received a PhD in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Stony Brook University in 2019. Her research and teaching interests span feminist studies, queer studies, disability studies, transgender studies, the public and digital humanities, and the history of gender and sexuality. Her current book project, “Conferencing on the Edge: A Queer History of Feminist Field Formation, 1969-89,” offers a history of the conflicts that shaped U.S. women’s studies and gay and lesbian studies in the 1970s and 1980s.
Katie Mackinnon is completing her PhD in the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto. Her research focuses on histories of the web, including early uses and experiences of young people in the late 1990s. She interrogates ethical approaches to web archival research and youth data, and examines social, infrastructural, and policy issues of the web.