The Digital Arts and Humanities PhD Certificate and Minor have been part of my service to IU since before my official appointment to history.
In 2014, the committee to develop a certificate program convened without a historian, and I sought permission from then-chair Eric Sandweiss to represent history’s needs. The certificate and minor program cleared the IU systemwide approval process in mid-2017, and on my appointment as IDAH’s co-director in August of 2017, I took on the task of developing the curricular and administrative infrastructure necessary to launch the program. That included the recruiting and convening of a curriculum committee to oversee and advise students in the program, as well as the development, submission and teaching of new courses to meet the program requirements.
At the end of the 2017-2018 year, its first year in existence, we awarded the certificate to 3 people (including the producer of IU’s first born-digital dissertation in the College of Arts & Sciences, now the Digital Humanities Librarian at University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign) and the minor to another 3. By 2023, the program had 18 students at various stages of progress to degree. As part of IDAH program-building efforts under my purview, the IDAH staff visited a number graduate student orientation programs each fall–I presented at 20 personally between 2022 and 2023–and we developed outreach programs to DGSs and chairs across a variety of schools and departments to bring more students into the certificate/minor program. Advising and peer-review of students in the certificate and minor program was one of my responsibilities as the disciplinary specialist among IDAH’s co-directors. After IDAH was defunded in 2024 as part of a large-scale shift in IU-Bloomington’s research priorities, I have continued to serve as the primary advisor for the program.
