People

Bridging Departments and People in a Digital Age

Pamella Lach
Digital Humanities Librarian and DH Center Director
Pamella R. Lach is a national leader in using digital technologies to create a new future for the academic humanities. She is the co-creator with the National Humanities Center of the acclaimed series of podcast institutes that have helped more than 550 graduate students, faculty, library folks, alt-ac workers, and independent scholars move towards a more collaborative, care-centered, networked approach to the humanities. Dr. Lach’s work is grounded in an ethics of care and community building, critical and ethical applications of technology in research and teaching, and process-oriented experimentation. She is part of the editorial team of dh+lib and a member of the Executive Council of the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH), the major digital humanities professional society in the United States.

Sureshi M. Jayawardene
Africana Studies
Sureshi Jayawardene is associate professor of Africana Studies. She received her Ph.D. in African American Studies from Northwestern University and now is an Africana social scientist specializing in the western Indian Ocean African diaspora and an Associate Professor of Africana studies at SDSU. Her research and teaching interests include Africana geographies and epistemologies, diaspora, memory, expressive cultures, spirituality, Africana families and kinship formations, Black digital humanities, and research methods. She is currently working on a book combining ethnography, interviews, archival research, and content analyses with theories of diaspora, Pan-Africanism, Black Geographies, and Africana aesthetics to culturally situate her investigation into conceptions of selfhood and community among people of African descent in Sri Lanka. Her publications about South Asian Africana communities have appeared in the Journal of Black Studies and the Journal of African American Studies. Jayawardene is also a co-founder and currently co-directs the Afrometrics Research Institute.

Jessica Pressman
English and Comparative Literature
Dr. Jessica Pressman is a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at San Diego State University. She is the author of Bookishness: Loving Books in a Digital Age (Columbia UP, 2020) and Digital Modernism: Making It New in New Media (Oxford UP, 2014), co-author, with Mark C. Marino and Jeremy Douglass, of Reading Project: A Collaborative Analysis of William Poundstone’s Project for Tachistocope {Bottomless Pit} (Iowa UP, 2015), and co-editor, with N. Katherine Hayles, of Comparative Textual Media: Transforming the Humanities in a Postprint Era (Minnesota UP, 2013). She is a recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). Her full CV can be found at www.jessicapressman.com.

Joanna Brooks
English and Comparative Literature
Dr. Joanna Brooks is the Associate Vice President of Faculty Affairs and a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at San Diego State University. She is a national voice on religion and American life and the author or editor of six books on race, gender, colonialism, and religion in American literature and culture. Her recent books include The Book of Mormon Girl: A Memoir of An American Faith (Simon & Schuster, 2012), winner of the 2012 award in memoir from the Association of Mormon Letters, Transatlantic Feminisms in the Age of Revolutions (Oxford UP, 2012), and Why We Left: Untold Songs and Stories of America’s First Immigrants (University of Minnesota, 2013). Her scholarship has been supported and honored with awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Association, and the Modern Language Association. She has appeared as a commentator or guest on NPR, MSNBC, and the Daily Show, and her writing has also appeared in the Washington Post, Huffington Post, Tablet, Salon, and ReligionDispatches.org. See more at joannabrooks.org.

Patrick Flanigan
DH Center Programs & Operations Specialist
Patrick Flanigan is the Digital Humanities Center Programs & Operations Specialist. He supports the DH Initiative’s research, scholarly and creative activities in the Digital Humanities Center. This involves leading the production of digital literacy and tool-based (asynchronous) tutorials and other online learning materials, including creating new tutorials and overseeing student assistants’ production of peer-to-peer tool tutorials; tutorial topics might focus on (but are not limited to): Adobe Creative Cloud, lightweight data visualization platforms,  podcasting, digital storytelling and electronic-literature platforms, mobile applications, and text analysis tools.
Patrick is a resource for users interested in podcasting and video as he specializes in recording, editing, and production. He is a supporter of Arsenal Football Club.