OAH to Co-Host Panel Discussion, “Recovering America’s Unmapped Histories,” on Friday, Nov. 5

The Organization of American Historians (OAH) will co-host a panel discussion, “Recovering America’s Unmapped Histories,” on Friday, November 5, 2021, from 4:00 to 5:30 p.m. at the Herman B. Wells Library (Hazelbaker Hall, Wells E159) on the IU-Bloomington campus. The event is co-hosted with the College Arts and Humanities Institute, Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities, and the IU-Bloomington Department of History, as part of GIS DAY @ IU 2021: Mapping the Public Sphere—Citizen Science, Participatory History, and Public Engagement with the Academy. The panel is free and open to the public.

The panel will bring Dr. Marco Robinson, Assistant Director of the Ruth J. Simmons Center for Race and Justice at Prairie View A&M University; Dr. Gregory Maddox, Dean of the Graduate School and Director of International Programs at Texas Southern; and Dr. David Trowbridge, William T. Kemper Associate Research Professor of Digital and Public Humanities at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, into conversation about the intersections of public history, memory, and the potentials for digital history projects to contribute to a more inclusive memorialization landscape. Panelists will consider deficiencies and opportunities in the built memorialization landscape and how digital tools and technologies, together with community engagement, can expand our interpretation of monumental landscapes and communities, and function as partial correctives to the biases and absences inherent in memorialization across the country.

For more information and registration, visit: https://events.iu.edu/idah/event/251945-recovering-americas-unmapped-histories-a.

Panelists:

Marco Robinson is a historian, archival and qualitative methods specialist. Marco is the Assistant Director of the Ruth J. Simmons Center for Race and Justice at Prairie View A&M University. Robinson’s recent co-edited book, “Contemporary Debates in Social Justice: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Exploring the Lives of Black and Brown Americans” explores the complexities around Black and Brown communities and social justice issues. Marco specializes in historic preservation and facilitating projects that engage in the digitization of historical pictures and documents. Robinson’s 2018 article “Telling the Stories of Forgotten Communities,” explores the efficacy of oral histories and working on collaborative teams to document the histories of black communities. Marco is a strong advocate for community studies and organizing community archives. His current research projects deal with the impact of COVID-19 on black church congregations in Waller County, TX and exploring the legacy of slavery and impact of segregation at Prairie View A&M University.

Keeping his scholarly activities linked to national and state learned societies, Marco is an active member in the Association for Computers and the Humanities and The Social Science History Association. His most recent digital humanities project deals with digitizing the black experience in Waller County, Texas. Robinson also participates in the Texas Oral History Association, The Texas Historical Association, The National Council on Public History, Association for Critical Heritage Studies and the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. Robinson is an active mentor, committed advisor, innovative instructor, and dedicated researcher.

Gregory H. Maddox is a specialist in African and environmental history. He holds a BA from the University of Virginia and a Ph.D. from Northwestern University. He is a a specialist in the history of East Africa and environmental history. In addition to teaching at Texas Southern for over 30 years, he spent a year at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania as a Fulbright Senior Lecturer. He currently serves as Dean of the Graduate School and Director of International Programs at Texas Southern. His responsibilities include overseeing 32 graduate programs at the university offering masters and doctoral degrees. He has led the University’s institutional accreditation efforts for the last 14 years. He helped create the University’s international study programs that have sent hundreds of TSU students on international experiences. He has published articles in Environmental History, Journal of African History, Comparative Studies in Society and History, African Studies Review, Tanzania Zamani, and The International Journal of African Historical Studies as well as in several edited collections. He has co-edited two collections with James Giblin of the University of Iowa, Custodians of the Land: Environment and History in Tanzania (with I.N. Kimambo), and In Search of the Nation: Histories of Authority and Dissidence from Tanzania. His translation of Mathias Mnyampala’s The Gogo: History, Customs, and Traditions from Swahili was a finalist for the African Studies Association’s Text Prize in 1997. His most recent scholarly books are Practicing History in Central Tanzania: Writing, Memory, and Performance with Ernest M. Kongola (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2006), Sub-Saharan Africa: An Environmental History (Boulder: ABC/CLIO, 2006), with Karl Ittmann of the University of Houston and Dennis Cordell of Southern Methodist University The Demography of Empire (Ohio University Press, 2010), and with I. N. Kimambo and Salvatory Nyanto, A New History of Tanzania (Mkuki na Nyota Press, 2018).

David Trowbridge (Ph.D. Kansas, 2008) is the William T. Kemper Associate Research Professor of Digital and Public Humanities at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. As part of his research and teaching, Trowbridge uses technology to connect people to history. As part of that effort, Trowbridge authored A History of the United States, a textbook published under a Creative Commons license and available to students and the public in various formats. In 2013, Trowbridge began work on Clio, a website and mobile application that connects people to nearby history and culture. Clio is free for everyone and has grown to over 35,000 articles for individual landmarks and over twelve hundred walking tours and virtual tours of museums and historic sites.