Immersives provide Ph.D. students with the opportunity to gain experiences with host organizations in collaborative, mission-focused project work drawing on their high-level skills as researchers and writers. These experiences can range from short-term micro-consultancies to multi-month projects. See the 2020/2021 cohort flyer (PDF).

Fall 2021 / Spring 2022 Fellows

Drawing on her interest in using oral history as a pedagogical tool, Jessica Batychenko (English), will work on two oral history projects with Rivers of Steel, a non-profit organization that showcases southwestern Pennsylvania’s industrial and cultural heritage.

• From the Archives to the Classroom: Oral History in Steel City
• Let Me Tell You a Story: Oral History from Interviews to Education

Emilee Ruhland (English) will use her communications and research skills to create a social media and marketing plan and a database of public art calls for proposals for Mikael Owunna Studios, a queer, Black-owned business.

• Transforming Space with Mikael Owunna Studios
• Archiving Queer Blackness: Working with Multimedia Artist Mikael Owunna

Fall 2020 / Spring 2021 Fellows

Amanda Dibando Awanjo (English) will utilize her experience with digital humanities to support the Carnegie Museum of Art’s upcoming 125^th anniversary. She will work with the museum’s anti-racist task force to create digital content surrounding and amplifying the museum’s equity and anti-racism strategy and conduct archival research with the museum’s special collections.

• Opening a Door to Black Pittsburgh History through the Carnegie Museum of Art
• Antiracism and the Archive: Carnegie Museum of Art

Drawing on her interest in alternative education as a key aspect of social justice for children, Brittney Knotts (English) will work with Assemble, a non-profit space for arts and technology education, to organize their online archives and to conduct interviews with previous teachers and students to help Assemble measure its impact.

• Digging in Deep: Assemble’s 10-Year Archival Project
• Practicing Listening: When Humanities Meets Humans

Building on her research into the history of landscape photography, Paula Kupfer (History of Art and Architecture) will produce an online exhibition/publication that focuses on the history of the plant collections in the Carnegie Museum of Natural History’s herbarium as well as organize a guided outdoor walk around local plant species.

• Crossdisciplinary Conversations: Plants & Art History
• The Expansive Specimen

Ben Naismith (Linguistics) will use his pedagogical experience, background in computational linguistics, and interest in technology and education to help startup Clearspace develop the study tool Leto (aka Learning Together). This will entail a literature review, offering feedback on the tool, and producing Natural Language Processing (NLP) modules.

• Learning Together: My Work on Leto
• Communal Knowledge and Spaced Repetition

Applying her training as an ethnomusicologist, Hannah Standiford (Music) will mix and edit recordings and interview participants to help Classical Revolution RVA develop soundscape.social. The interactive website permits listeners to move through a sonic space and enables musicians and audience members to interact with one another in real time.

• Interactive Listening Experiences with soundscape.social
• Virtual Listening with Classical Revolution RVA

Celena Todora (English) will draw on her scholarly interests in prison education as well as her grant writing and research skills to facilitate Let’s Get Free’s Let’s Get Smart initiative that aims to increase opportunities for higher education in Pennsylvania prisons through Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs).

• Writing and Education in Community Contexts: Writing and Learning for Freedom

• Writing and Educating for Freedom amidst Institutional Constraints: Prison Abolition, Foundations, and MOOCs