This is Ashley Newby and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a series of conversations examining the history of the field. Our conversations engage with a wide range of activists and scholars - senior figures in the field, late doctoral students, and everyone in between, culture workers, and political organizers - in order to explore the cultural and political meaning of Black Studies as an area of inquiry and its critical methods.
Today's conversation is with Alex Gil, who teaches in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Yale University, where he conducts introductory and advanced courses in digital humanities, and runs project-based learning and collective research initiatives. Before joining Yale, Alex served for ten years as Digital Scholarship Librarian at Columbia University, where he co-created and nurtured the
Butler Studio and the
Group for Experimental Methods in Humanistic Research. His research interests include Caribbean culture and history, digital humanities and technology design for different infrastructural and socio-economic environments, and the ownership and material extent of the cultural and scholarly record. He is currently senior editor of
archipelagos journal, editor of internationalization of
Digital Humanities Quarterly, co-organizer of
The Caribbean Digital annual conference, and co-principal investigator of the
Caribbean Digital Scholarship Collective, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon foundation.
Over the past decade, he has been a prolific producer and contributing team member of many recognized digital humanities projects and scholarly software, including
Torn Apart/Separados,
In The Same Boats and
Wax. His scholarly articles have appeared in several essay collections and refereed journals around the world, including
Genesis (France), the
Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, and
Revista de Investigaciones Literarias y Culturales (Venezuela). His forthcoming edition and translation of the lost, original version of Aimé Césaire’s “…..Et les chiens se taisaient” is forthcoming from Duke University Press.