Our Community

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 (he/him) 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.

Dr. Nadejda I. Webb is the Assistant Director of LifexCode: Digital Humanities Against Enclosure and a Visiting Assistant Professor at The Center for Digital Humanities at Johns Hopkins. She is also the Vice Chair of the American Studies Association Digital Humanities Caucus. Dr. Webb’s teaching and research interests include 20th- and 21st-century African American and postcolonial literature, as well as digital humanities, imaginaries, and representation. Webb’s research has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, Columbia University’s Center for Oral History, the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, and Vanderbilt University. She earned a joint Ph.D. in English and Comparative Media Analysis and Practice from Vanderbilt University and a B.A. in English Language and Literature from CUNY Hunter College.

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.

Sena Amuzu (she/her) is a first year PhD student pursuing a combined degree in American studies and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. Moving freely between databases, archives, and museums, art anchors her writing, which creatively and critically engages questions of embodiment—form, shape, space, temporalities—concerning theorizations of visuality, perception, and affect. Sena is currently an Wurtele Gallery Teacher at the Yale University Art Gallery, a member of KyKy Archives and contributed to the recent publication of What Black Is This You Say? (The MIT Press, 2025). This summer Sena will participate in the third annual Caribbean Digital Scholarship Summer Institute (CDSsi).