Kelvin Smith Library and the Freedman Center for Digital Scholarship selected Gillian Weiss, associate professor of history, and William Rogers, lecturer in English, as 2015 Freedman Fellows.
Weiss’ project aims to uncover the historical role of Jewish students, faculty and administrators in the social movements, physical infrastructure and intellectual life of Case Western Reserve University from its founding to the present. A website featuring archival documents, images, video, audio and interactive finding aids with accompanying explanatory essays will be developed during the course of the fellowship.
Rogers’ project is focused on the authors and scribes whose lives intersected with St. Bartholomew’s, a former church complex and current hospital in London. St. Bartholomew’s was present in the lives of several late-medieval and early modern English literary figures and was important in the dissemination of manuscripts and incunabula that today serve partly as foundation for the early English literary canon. The goal of this project is to track not only the authors and scribes involved with or living at St. Bartholomew’s, but also the manuscripts and imprints produced there. An interactive map and accompanying digital archive will be produced from the results.
The Freedman Fellows Program is funded and supported by the College of Arts and Sciences, the Kelvin Smith Library and the Freedman Fellows Endowment by Samuel B. and Marian K. Freedman. This annual award is given to full-time faculty whose current scholarly research projects involve some corpus of data that is of scholarly or instructional interest (e.g., data sets, digital texts, digital images, databases), involve the use of digital tools and processes and have clearly articulated project outcomes.
More information about the program can be found at library.case.edu/ksl/freedmancenter/digitalscholarship/fellows/.