John Wilkin (PI), Juanita J. and Robert E. Simpson Dean of Libraries and University Librarian at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Since the 1980’s, Wilkin has been pivotal in the creation and leadership of digital library projects, including Making of America, the Humanities Text Initiative, the Google Books digitization project, and HathiTrust, for which he served as Executive Director. While serving as part of the University of Michigan Library’s leadership team, Wilkin led in the merger of library and U-M Press publishing operations and helped shape innovative publishing cost models. Wilkin served in several positions at Michigan, including as the AUL for Library Information Technology and Technical and Access Services and Head of the Digital Library Production Service; while at the University of Virginia, Wilkin led in the creation of network-based infrastructure for Virginia’s digital initiatives. From 1986-1992, while at Michigan, Wilkin was responsible for several notable pre-Web networked digital library efforts, including networked access to large text corpora (and the application of SGML to texts) and online access to numeric data sets. Wilkin has graduate degrees in English from the University of Virginia and library science from the University of Tennessee.
Ronald W. Bailey (Co-PI), Head of the Department of African American Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign since July 2012. He is a 1965 graduate of Evans County History School in Claxton, GA, and a 1969 Phi Beta Kappa graduate with a BA in Liberal Arts (Cross-Cultural Studies) from Michigan State University’s Justin Morrill College. He holds an MA in Political Science from Stanford and a Ph.D. in Black Studies from Stanford, the first such degree awarded in the United States in 1980. He has taught at Fisk University, Cornell, Northwestern, the University of Mississippi (as chair of the African American Studies Program), and Northeastern University, where he chaired the Department of African-American Studies for eight years. He also served as Vice President for Academic Affairs at South Carolina State University and at Knoxville College, and as a senior scientist with the Education Development Center, Inc. Work on digital technologies has included the development of two website: NubiaNet with support from NEH and digNubia, with support from the National Science Foundation. He has served as a member of the national advisory board of the William and Ida Friday Institute for Educational Innovation at North Carolina State University since 2008.
Antoinette Burton (Co-PI), Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational Studies and Professor of History and Director of the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her work focuses on the modern British empire, with particular attention to women, gender, sexuality, race, postcolonialism and the worlds that imperialism made and unmade. Her research has been supported by the NEH, the ACLS and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. Her most recent monograph is The Trouble with Empire: Challenges to Modern British Imperialism, published in 2015 by Oxford University Press. Burton is also the PI for Humanities Without Walls, a related project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Allen Renear (Co-PI), Dean and Professor, School of Information Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He teaches and leads research in data curation, digital humanities, information modeling, and scholarly publishing. Prior to joining GSLIS, he was Director of Brown University Scholarly Technology Group. He served as President of the Association for Computers & the Humanities and was a distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Oxford University Humanities Computing Unit. He has an AB from Bowdoin College and an MA and PhD from Brown University.
Harriett Green, Head of Scholarly Communication and Publishing, Scholarly Communication and Publishing Librarian, and associate professor, University Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Harriett manages the project activities and infrastructure for Publishing Without Walls. Her research focuses on the use and users of digital humanities tools and resources, development of digital scholarship services, digital pedagogy, and humanities data curation. Harriett earned her M.S. in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois, and also holds a M.A. in Humanities from the University of Chicago and a B.A. in History and Literature from Harvard University. Her research has been supported by grants awarded from the Institute for Museum and Library Services and National Endowment for the Humanities.
Megan Senseney, Research Scientist, Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship (CIRSS), School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She received an A.B. in French and Comparative Literature from Bryn Mawr College (2007) and a Masters of Science in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2008). Senseney has a record of successfully managing projects, both large and small, funded by NEH, IMLS, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Her research interests relate to scholarly practices in the digital humanities and data curation.
Marilyn Thomas-Houston, Visiting Research Specialist/Digital Humanities, Department of African-American Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Until she retired in June 2015, Thomas-Houston was Joint Associate Professor of African American Studies and Anthropology at the University of Florida. She is the Co-founding Editor with Daryl Michael Scott of a new peer-reviewed journal, Fire!!!: The Multimedia Journal of Black Studies. The journal is published by the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH) and made accessible online by JSTOR as a part of its Current Scholarship initiative www.fire-jbs.org. She also edited a special issue of the International Journal of Africana Studies, a compilation of papers and discussions by key Black Studies scholars at a convening sponsored by the Ford Foundation, which was distributed at the 2011 NCBS meeting. Her research publications include an ethnography, ‘Stony the Road’ to Change: Black Mississippians and the Culture of Social Relations published by Cambridge University Press (2005) and the edited volume, Homing Devices: The Poor as Targets of Public Housing Policy and Practice published by Lexington Books in 2006. Since 2013-2014, she has served as Visiting Research Specialist in the Department of African American Studies at the University of Illinois.
Maria Bonn, Senior Lecturer, School of Information Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Maria Bonn teaches courses on the role of libraries in scholarly communication and publishing. Prior to her teaching appointment, Bonn served as the Associate University Librarian for Publishing at the University of Michigan Library, with responsibility for publishing and scholarly communications initiatives, including the University of Michigan Press and the Scholarly Publishing Office. Bonn has also been an assistant professor of English at institutions both in the Unites States and abroad. She received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Rochester, master’s and doctoral degrees in American Literature from SUNY Buffalo, and a master’s in information and library science from the University of Michigan.
Janet Swatscheno, Visiting Digital Publishing Specialist, University Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Janet develops workflows for managing library-based digital publishing projects including scoping projects, tool selection, and manuscript preparation. She consults with publishing partners to develop editorial workflows, and provides consultations on the suite of publishing tools offered PWW and the Illinois Open Publishing Network.
Chris Maden, Visiting Research Programmer for Scholarly Communication and Publishing, University Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
LaTesha Velez, graduate research assistant, School of Information Sciences.
Katrina Fenlon, graduate research assistant, School of Information Sciences.
Joshua Lynch, graduate assistant, School of Information Sciences and African American Studies.