The University of Iowa Graduate College and the UI Libraries Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio are excited to announce that 11 graduate students have been selected for the 2023 Studio Summer Fellowship program. These individuals will soon take part in an 8-week course that provides mentored digital scholarship experience, as well as training in skills and tools they will use as they pursue innovative ways of thinking about and sharing their creative endeavors.

Luke Allan, MFA Student, Center for the Book

Mary Ellen Solt (1920–2007) was an experimental poet born in Gilmore City, Iowa. She worked in the “concrete” style: many of her poems are shaped as flowers and plants. Unfortunately Solt’s poems are now largely forgotten. There are no editions of her work in print, and her writing attracts little scholarly attention. This project seeks to change that by bringing her poems back into print and exploring the possibility of presenting them in digital form.

Gracie Baer, MFA Student, Sculpture and Intermedia

Through the Digital Scholarship and Publishing Fellowship, Gracie Baer wants to support Ana Mendeita’s archive at the University of Iowa and develop an active dedication and archive to the groundbreaking work the artist created in Iowa. Through her search for Ana’s work in Iowa, she has also been immersed in other Intermedia artists’ work– leading her to believe that her quest to learn more about Mendieta’s time in Iowa is also rooted in creating a more conclusive archive of Intermedia. 

Kassie Baron, PhD Candidate, History

The “Mill Girl Archive” will serve as an interactive repository of Nineteenth-century writings by and about New England’s female textile mill operatives beginning with one of the primary “mill girl” texts: The Lowell Offering. The Offering was a magazine that published the writing of operatives in Lowell. This digital archive will collect and sort the stories, essays, poems, and editorials from the magazine’s five-year run use by the public, students, and specialists.

Samuel Boucher, PhD Student, History

Samuel plans to spend time this summer creating a map of Mennonite colonies across the world. He also hopes to perform textual analysis across newspapers to see how these communities were perceived through time.

Stevie Delgado, MFA Student, Intermedia

To Kiss the Sun, a namesake that originates from Stevie’s first curated exhibition, is a project that will incorporate 3-D printing, projection mapping, and printed plexiglass through laser cutting to create an interlocking sculpture with refractive images of an anomalous narrative about transitive periods in life, not unlike the rise and fall of the sun. Through experimentation and practical application, Stevie will explore projection mapping as a fractured light source while utilizing varying materials and films to act as screens and as refractive surfaces. The projections will ricochet in sporadic patterns and emulate sun rays through digital means.

Rachael Maxon, PhD Student, Art History

Rachael plans to create an Omeka catalogue of several objects imported to Susa, Iran between 3000-300 BCE to better understand the collective memory of kingship at this site and region more broadly.

Aaron Pang, MFA Candidate, Nonfiction Writing

Over the summer, Aaron plans to work on a podcast exploring the roots of creativity and craft. The goal for the project is to look more into how writers write across across various genres.

Regan Smock, PhD Student, Sociology

Regan’s research interests include social psychology, culture, and emotions. Currently she is working on a project that is exploring how people make every day moral judgments on a subreddit called “Am I the Asshole”.

Greg Wickenkamp, PhD Student, History

Greg will adapt L. M. Bogad’s Cointelshow: A Patriot Act, a play about the FBI’s COINTELPRO. His adaptation will include more focus on Iowa, surveillance capitalism, and the de facto continuation of COINTELPRO repression efforts past the program’s official end in 1971. 

PJ Zaborowski, PhD Student, English

PJ plans to spend his time this summer creating a digital component to his dissertation. This work will explore what can be gleaned about the medieval world system through text mining and other avenues.

Elizabeth Zak, PhD Student, Informatics

Elizabeth’s summer project explores the evolution of digital misinformation. By using data mining, textual analysis and temporal analysis, Elizabeth plans to evaluate conspiracy theories’ content, popularity and spread on Twitter.