Our Community

Dorothy Berry is the Digital Curator for the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. She graduated from the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology with an MA and the School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering at Indiana University, with an MLS. In 2020-2021, she was honored with Library Journal’s “Movers and Shakers” award, and the Society of American Archivists’ Mark A. Greene Emerging Leader award. Her work has focused on the intersections of information discovery and African American history, ranging from newspaper database research on the earliest mentions of African American concert music performances, to inventory design for the cosmetic kit of Hollywood's first Black woman makeup artist, to exhibit curation highlighting transatlantic art inspired by African American film.

Jennifer L. Morgan is Professor of History in the department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. She is the author of the Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic (Duke University Press, 2021) which won the Mary Nickliss Prize in Women’s and/or Gender History from the Organization of American Historians and the Frederick Douglass Prize awarded by the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition; and of Laboring Women: Gender and Reproduction in the Making of New World Slavery (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). She is the the co-editor of Connexions: Histories of Race and Sex in America (University of Illinois Press, 2016). Her research examines the intersections of gender and race in in the early modern Black Atlantic. In addition to her archival work as an historian, Morgan has published a range of essays on race, gender, and the process of “doing history,” most notably “Experiencing Black Feminism” in Deborah Gray White’s edited volume Telling Histories: Black Women Historians in the Ivory Tower (2007).

Bilphena Yahwon is a Baltimore-based writer, abolitionist and restorative practices specialist born in Liberia, West Africa. Yahwon is the author of 'teaching gold-mah how to heal herself.’ the co-creator of For Black Girls Considering Womanism Because Feminism Is Not Enuf and a core member of Press Press. Her online library, The Womanist Reader, is dedicated to archiving free texts from Black women across the diaspora. Bilphena’s work uses a womanist approach and centers women’s health and well being, intersectionality and abolition. She writes of the immigrant experience, of blackness, and of healing.

Our Digital Artist in Residence, Soraya Jean­-Louis, is a Haitian born, Harlem and Brooklyn raised mixed media queer womynist artist currently living and loving in New Orleans. Soraya is the co-founder of Wildseeds: New Orleans Octavia Butler Emergent Strategy Collective. Wildseeds' work, steeped in Black feminist traditions of survival and healing, engages Octavia Butler and other F/SF authors as a resource for social change. In 2014, Soraya was awarded the Alternate ROOTS Visual Scholars grant. In 2015, she served as the creative facilitator, curator, and contributing artist for Wildseeds' “Sacred Space” at Exhibit BE and co-organizer of Black Futures Fest: A Celebration of the Black Fantastic in New Orleans.

Alex Gil is Senior Lecturer II and Associate Research Faculty of Digital Humanities in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Yale University. He is currently senior editor of archipelagos journal. 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 more recently, (Un)Silencing Slavery.

Jessica Marie Johnson is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at the Johns Hopkins University and author of Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Slavery in the Atlantic World (Penn Press, 2022). She is the Director of LifexCode: Digital Humanities Against Enclosure, a PI on Black BeyondData, and on the Black Press Research Collective with Kim Gallon and Alexandre White. She is co-PI on the Diaspora Solidarities Lab a virtual Black feminist pedagogies and practice lab.

Nadejda I. Webb (she/her/they) is currently an ACLS Emerging Voices Postdoctoral Fellow in Black Digital Humanities at the Johns Hopkins University, where her teaching and research interests include 20th and 21st-century African-American and Post-Colonial literature and digital humanities, imaginaries, and belonging. In 2024, Dr. Webb will be the incoming Assistant Director of LifexCode: Digital Humanities Against Enclosure and a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Center for Digital Humanities.

Alexandre White is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and of the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University and School of Medicine. He is the PI of Underwriting Souls, a project to digitize the archives of Lloyd’s, the insurance market pertaining to the trans-Atlantic slavery. In addition to his role as faculty, he is also the Associate Director for the Center for Medical Humanities and Social Medicine.