Category Archives: MLA2021

Digital Humanities has been variously defined as an emerging field, a transdisciplinary set of methods, a neoliberal takeover of the arts and humanities, and an incidental supplement to disciplinary knowledge. It has been leveraged to broaden STEM initiatives, expanded to embrace computational approaches to writing, media, and cultural studies, positioned to reinvent libraries, and academic publishing, and broadened to include transformations of pedagogical practice, in person and online.In 2009, another time of global crisis, DH was labeled “the next big thing” as it continued to grow through new hires, programs, publications, and projects when most other fields in the humanities did not. Just over a decade later—as the world, universities, and cultural institutions face social and financial crises, how does a multifarious DH respond? What lessons, as a field that is in constant reinvention and expansion, can be gleaned from the recent history of DH. Can another moment of crisis coalesce a core in the field, or hasten us towards a post-DH landscape?

This session aims to be a town hall meeting. With this, the Forum seeks to address the role of, and lessons from, the field which in 2008-2009 became associated to administrative responses to the financial crisis.

We anticipate focusing on issues of social justice, labor, and critical debate during the discussion, but are open to additional topics and ideas. Part of our goal is to set the agenda for the TC DH Forum program for 2022 and beyond.