DHRI Faculty & Fellows
Central Faculty and Administration

Lisa Rhody
Director of the Digital Humanities Research Institute
Deputy Director of Digital Initiatives at The Graduate Center, CUNY

Matthew K. Gold
Associate Professor of English and Digital Humanities
Advisor to the Provost for Digital Initiatives

Kalle Westerling
Program Coordinator of the Digital Humanities Research Institute
Ph.D. Candidate, Theatre and Performance, The Graduate Center, CUNY

Stephen Zweibel
Digital Scholarship Librarian and Assistant Professor at The Graduate Center, CUNY
Visiting Presenters and Instructors

Nicky Agate
Assistant Director of Scholarly Communication and Projects, Columbia University Libraries

Jill Cirasella
Associate Librarian for Public Services and Scholarly Communication at The Graduate Center, CUNY

Patricia Hswe
Program Officer, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

Kelly Baker Josephs
Associate Professor of English at York College, CUNY

Shana Kimball
Managing Director of Research, Data & Society

Michelle McSweeney
Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University’s Center for Spatial Research

Julia Miele Rodas
Professor of English at Bronx Community College, CUNY

Katina Rogers
Director of Administration and Programming, Futures Initiative

Luke Waltzer
Director, Teaching and Learning Center, The Graduate Center, CUNY
GC Digital Fellows

Hannah Aizenman
Digital Fellow, Computer Science
Hannah Aizenman is a doctoral student in Computer Science. Her research is in using machine learning to make sense of and visualize multivariate spatio-temporal, mostly climate, datasets and the algorithms run on them. At the City College of New York, she taught multiple variants of introduction to programming a and piloted peer led team learning for the Computer Science department. She also teaches data science using Python and mentors high school stunds for the CREST HIRES earth science and remote sensing REU at CCNY. She is an organizer of the New York City Linux User's Group, is on the planning committee for the American Meteorology Society's Python Symposium, and a core contributor to the matplotlib Python visualization library.

Kelsey Chatlosh
Digital Fellow, Anthropology
Kelsey Chatlosh is a cultural anthropology Ph.D. student and Digital Fellow at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). Her future dissertation research focuses on Afro-Chilean activism for state recognition, territory and alternative discourses of memory and history, and how they are contesting dominant narratives of Chilean history and nationhood. Her work as a Digital Fellow is focused on digital tools and platforms for qualitative research and oral interviews, with an emphasis on ethics, political economy and decolonizing and feminist methods.

Jojo Karlin
Digital Fellow, English
Jojo Karlin is a second year doctoral student in English at The Graduate Center, CUNY, researching transmissions of memory after periods of rapid technological transformation. Coming from a theater background, Jojo loves the intersection of disciplines, multiple media, and diverse expertises she finds in Digital Humanities. For her first big DH project, she did outreach for TANDEM, a web tool that gathers text and image data, and she now proudly coordinates outreach for DH Box, the GC's NEH-funded DH cloud laboratory. She is a freelance editor for the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia, and is developing a digital interface for a collection of historical letters. Jojo is deeply interested in digital editions preserving past materiality while exploring new materials.

Javier Otero Peña
Digital Fellow, Environmental Psychology
Javier Otero Peña is a PhD student in Environmental Psychology from Caracas, Venezuela. Javier is a GC Digital Fellow since 2016 and a member of the Public Space Research Group, and currently works as a research assistant for the PARCS study in the CUNY School for Public Health. His dissertation will study the contextual impacts of park renovations in New York City, and will involve a map analysis using GIS technologies, a mini-ethnography using Qualitative Data Analysis (QDA) software, and natural language analysis of social media posts. Javier’s field research paper studied the politicization of public spaces through a participatory mural in East Harlem. In 2016, he took part in the CUNY-Humboldt University Summer School in Berlin, and in 2017 he participated in the Digital Humanities Research Institute in Victoria University, Canada. He also received the 2017 Provost’s Digital Innovation Grant. Javier holds a Master in Environmental Policies and Sustainable Development, and taught a class on Sustainable Development in Latin America and the Caribbean at the Paris Catholic University. He also studied Urban Planning and Management at UCV, and Sustainable Urban Mobility in Developing Countries (UNITAR). Javier worked as a consultant for the United Nations Environment Programme for three years.

Rachel Rakov
Digital Fellow, Linguistics
Rachel Rakov is a doctoral student in the Linguistics Department, with a focus in Computational Linguistics. Her dissertation research is on using prosody modeling to train computational models that can distinguishing between native and non-native English questions. She has also worked on building tools for automatic language identification, and tools for automatic detection of sarcastic speech. She has presented her research at Interspeech and ASRU. In addition, Rachel has helped develop and teach courses in Python programming and Natural Language Processing for the Computational Linguistics M.A. program at The Graduate Center. She was also a consultant on O'Reilly book <em>Introduction to Machine Learning</em>, where she provided input on how to make the content of the book more accessible to readers without a math or CS background. Rachel has been an intern with the Speech-Language Technology team at Interactions, and taught at Hunter College.

Patrick Smyth
Digital Fellow, English
Patrick Smyth is a fourth-year doctoral student in English. His research focuses on Utopian thought and the history of science in 18th and 19th century British literature. As a digital humanist, Patrick is concerned with digital platforms for research and pedagogy. He is currently a developer on the NEH-funded DH Box, a cloud-based platform for accessing digital humanities tools, and has received a Provost's Digital Innovation grant for an online archive of science fiction works. His most recent publication is “Ebooks and the Digital Paratext: Emerging Trends in the Interpretation of Digital Media” in Examining Paratextual Theory and Its Applications in Digital Culture. Patrick was a 2010 Fulbright Teaching Fellow in Berlin, Germany, and teaches composition and literature at Queens College.

Patrick Sweeney
Digital Fellow, Psychology
Patrick Sweeney is a PhD Candidate in Psychology and a Digital Fellow at the Graduate Center, CUNY. His dissertation traces the historical development of methods for quantifying human experience in psychology, business, and politics; and shows how their entwined histories animate current controversies surrounding the use of personal digital data in research, propaganda, and marketing. He has published on topics including the ethics of social media data in psychological research, media representations of social identities and urban change after trauma, and the theory and praxis of ethics and methods pedagogy. His work as a GC Digital Fellow has focused on workshop development, ethics in digital research, and supporting social media and web tools. He has previously taught at Hunter College, CUNY, and served as a Writing Across the Curriculum fellow at Kingsborough Community College, CUNY.

Kristen Hackett
Digital Fellow, Psychology
Kristen Hackett is a scholar, activist and educator living and working in New York City. She is a PhD Candidate in Environmental Psychology Program at the Graduate Center of the City of New York, a Digital Fellow with the GC Digital Scholarship Lab, a Digital Pedagogy Fellow with the OpenLab at City Tech, a Coordinator of OpenCUNY, and a member of the Executive Committee of the Justice For All Coalition. Her research interests are in housing and community development in NYC, political and social responses to increasing insecurity and precarity and how art and technology can be used in consciousness-raising and resistance efforts and to advocate for community/human-centered policy development. For her dissertation, Kristen is exploring these themes through the lens a proposed rezoning in Long Island City, NY.