The University Library and the Dean of the Faculty, together with the Digital Publications Advisory Board, are pleased to announce the selection of the next four long-form scholarly works to be developed as part of Brown’s Digital Publications Initiative.

The Platinum Age of Gospel by Charrise Barron, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and Music, surveys the American national gospel music scene from 1993 to 2013, tracing a shift away from discourses rooted in the lived experience of race-based suffering toward a post-racial orientation that catered to mainstream audiences—a dramatic shift tied to revised theologies of salvation and sanctification. Barron’s interdisciplinary digital project, deeply engaging the fields of religion, Africana studies, and ethnomusicology, will present gospel music in a way that has never been experienced before—as an interactive, multimedia exploration of the sounds as well as the sights of gospel.

Art, Secrecy, and Invisibility in Ancient Egypt by Laurel Bestock, Associate Professor of Archaeology and the Ancient World & Egyptology and Assyriology, argues that partial, periodic, or total invisibility of art was precisely that quality that allowed art to be personal and to engage in social relationships, not just between living people but also across the divide of death and between the human and the divine. In looking at the complex life-histories of hidden objects in Egypt, with shifting capabilities and relationships over time, Bestock takes advantage of the digital environment to examine the role of vision in manipulating relationships of knowledge and power both in ancient Egypt and the modern day. 

The Sojourner Project: A Black Studies Mobile Academy by Tina Campt, Owen F. Walker Professor of Humanities and Professor of Modern Culture and Media, in collaboration with the Practicing Refusal Collective, an international Black feminist forum of artists and scholars, foregrounds dialogues on blackness, anti-black violence, and black futurity in the twenty-first century. Structured as a digital academy that intentionally aims to exceed the literal and figurative walls of the university, The Sojourner Project convenes transnational and diasporic conversations, workshops, and art activations that create multi-directional encounters with histories of struggle and practices of refusal that have emerged in different black communities. 

Imperial Unsettling: Indigenous and Immigrant Activism towards Collective Liberation by Kevin Escudero, Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnic Studies, examines the relationship between Indigenous CHamoru activists in Guåhan (Guam) and Asian immigrant community members’ participation in contemporary social movement activism in the Pacific. Developing Imperial Unsettling as a born-digital publication will allow Escudero to create an immersive experience for the reader by integrating the book’s long-form narrative with oral histories of Guåhan decolonization activists, archival documents related to key historical moments in the decolonization movement not easily accessible to folks residing off the island, and lesson plans on the movement for use by teachers on and off the island.

With continued support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Brown’s Digital Publications Initiative seeks to advance humanities scholarship by providing a university-based approach to the development, evaluation, and publication of born-digital scholarly monographs. With oversight from Brown’s Digital Scholarship Editor, projects that are selected by the Initiative’s Digital Publications Advisory Board are developed as digital works that draw upon the capabilities of the Library’s Center for Digital Scholarship. These scholarly works are then submitted to leading university presses that have corresponding academic interests and the infrastructure for peer review and digital publication.

The Initiative’s first born-digital scholarly monograph, Furnace and Fugue: A Digital Edition of Michael Maier’s Atalanta fugiens (1618) with Scholarly Commentary, co-edited by Tara Nummedal, Professor of History, and Independent Scholar Donna Bilak, was published by the University of Virginia Press in July 2020. Two other projects were recently accepted by leading university presses:

• Italian Shadows: A Curious History of Virtual Reality by Massimo Riva, Professor and Chair of Italian Studies (forthcoming with Stanford University Press); and 
• Islamic Pasts and Futures: Horizons of Time by Shahzad Bashir, Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Humanities and Professor of Religious Studies (forthcoming with MIT Press). 

Other digital works currently under development include: 

• The Sensory Monastery: Saint-Jean-des-Vignes co-authored by Sheila Bonde, Professor of History of Art and Architecture and Professor of Archaeology, and Clark Maines, Professor Emeritus of Art History at Wesleyan University; 
• At a Standstill, Moving: Gesture, Temporality and the Interval in Performance by Rebecca Schneider, Professor of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies; 
• Chika Sagawa, Japanese Modernist Poet by Sawako Nakayasu, Assistant Professor of Literary Arts; and
• Contemporary Monuments to the Slave Past by Renée Ater, Provost’s Visiting Professor of Africana Studies.

To learn more about Brown’s digital scholarly publication program, contact Digital Scholarship Editor Allison Levy ([email protected]).