Author Biographies

Djibrirou Daouda Ba Djibrirou Daouda Ba is a Doctor of Geography from Gaston Berger University and a lecturer at the Faculty of Science and Technology, Education and Training of Cheikh Anta Diop University, Senegal. He was previously a secondary school teacher and teacher trainer. Former winner of the Eugène Ionescu Postdoctoral Fellowship of the UAF in Romania, Dr. Ba also holds a Certificate of Aptitude for Secondary Education in History and Geography. His publications focus on environment, climate, and sustainability in education and teacher education.

Mamadou Yéro Baldé Mamadou Yéro Baldé is a teacher-researcher in the Faculty of Science and Technology of Education and Training at the Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar (Senegal) and an associate researcher at the Population and Development Center (Ceped, UMR 196), a research unit of the University of Paris Cité and the Institute of Research for Development (IRD). A member of the laboratories "Study and Research Group on Marginality and Social Exclusion" (GERMES) and "Professions, Memory and Territories in Africa" (M2TA), his research focuses on the history of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery and its pedagogical and academic perspectives, mobility, student nationalism, the African (post)colonial state, etc. He is the author and co-editor of several books.

Paul Barrett Paul Barrett is an Associate Professor in the School of English and Theatre Studies and in the Culture and Technology Studies programs at the University of Guelph. He is the author of Blackening Canada, 'Membering Austin Clarke, and Future Horizons: Canadian Digital Humanities.

Marcus Bingenheimer Marcus Bingenheimer is Associate Professor of Religion at Temple University. He has worked in Asia, North America, and Europe and supervised numerous projects concerning the digitization of Buddhist culture. His main research interests are Buddhist history and historiography, early sūtra literature, and how to apply computational approaches to research in the Humanities. He has written and edited a handful of books and some sixty-five peer-reviewed articles.

Justin Brody Justin Brody is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, PA. His main research is in artificial intelligence, including interactions between Buddhist studies and computer science. He earned his doctorate in pure mathematics from the University of Maryland in 2009.

Mamadou Séne Cissé Mamadou is general-secretary of Donkosira, a not-for-profit organisation promoting local knowledge in West Africa. He is working with underrepresented rural communities in West Africa, helping to highlight and share their traditions, languages, art, and cultural history through the use of information technology and digital communication, one of the significant challenges of the millennium. He was Co-I on the UKRI GCRF supported projects "Slavery and Forced Migration in Western Mali" (2020-2024) and "Equitable Climate Resilience in West Africa" (2019-2023), both led by Marie Rodet.

Sarah Ciston Sarah Ciston builds critical–creative tools to bring intersectional approaches to machine learning. Author of "A Critical Field Guide for Working with Machine Learning Datasets", they have recently been named an AI Newcomer by the German Informatics Society and an AI Anarchies Fellow at the Akademie der Künste Berlin. They hold a PhD in Media Arts and Practice from the University of Southern California and are the founder of Code Collective: an approachable, interdisciplinary community for co-learning programming. They are currently the Critical AI technical writer for p5.js (Processing Foundation), supported by Google Season of Docs.

Jeremy Douglass Jeremy Douglass is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is director of Digital Arts and Humanities Commons, an interdisciplinary co-working space for digital scholarship, pedagogy, and creative practice, and of the Center for Digital Games Research. He is co-author, with Jessica Pressman and Mark C. Marino, of Reading Project: A Collaborative Analysis of William Poundstone’s Project for Tachistoscope {Bottomless Pit} (Iowa University Press 2015), and co-author, with Montfort et. al, of 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 (MIT Press, 2012). Douglass conducts research on interactive narrative, electronic literature, and games, with a focus on the methods of software studies, critical code studies, and cultural analytics. His work has been supported by the NEH Office of Digital Humanities, MacArthur Foundation, Mellon Foundation, ACLS, Calit2, HASTAC, and NERSC.

Kelly M. Duke Bryant Kelly Duke Bryant specializes in African History at Rowan University. Her research focuses on children, youth, education, and colonialism in Senegal from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Her first book, Education as Politics: Colonial Schooling and Political Debate in Senegal, 1850s to 1914, was published by the University of Wisconsin Press in 2015, and her current book project explores how colonial institutions and policies — and African responses to them — produced new ideas about African childhood in the period prior to 1940. She has published articles and book chapters on students and schools, children and family relationships, liberated minors in Senegal, and other topics.

Sean Fraga Sean Fraga is the creator of and project director for Booksnake, which he developed as an Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellow with the Humanities in a Digital World program at the University of Southern California. He is currently an Assistant Professor (Teaching) of Environmental Studies and History at USC.

Samir Ghosh Samir Ghosh is a PhD Student in the Department of Computational Media at UC Santa Cruz. He researches virtual reality interfaces at the Social Emotional Technology Lab.

Walter Hawthorne Walter Hawthorne is a professor of African, Atlantic, and Digital History at Michigan State University. He is director of Enslaved.org and an editor of the Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation. His research focuses on the history of Atlantic slavery and the Atlantic trade in enslaved people of African descent.

Matthew S. Hopper Matthew S. Hopper is Professor of History at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. His book, Slaves of One Master: Globalization and Slavery in Arabia in the Age of Empire (Yale University Press, 2015), was a finalist for the 2016 Frederick Douglass Book Prize. He received his Ph.D. in History from UCLA, M.A. in African Studies from UCLA, and M.A. in History from Temple University. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale University, a Member at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, the Smuts Visiting Research Fellow in Commonwealth Studies at the University of Cambridge, a British Academy Visiting Fellow at King's College London, and the Ali Mazrui Senior Fellow at the Africa Institute in Sharjah. He has received fellowships from Fulbright (IIE), the Social Science Research Council, and Fulbright-Hays, and his writing has been published in Annales, Itinerario, History in Africa, and the Journal of African Development. He is writing a book on the history of liberated Africans in the Indian Ocean world.

Henry Huang Shih-Hsuan (Henry) Huang is an experienced software engineer with a Master’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Southern California. He commenced his professional journey at Apple, where he has dedicated his career to developing innovative solutions that positively impact the world.

Michael Hughes Michael Hughes is an undergraduate student majoring in Computer Science in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering.

Annette Joseph-Gabriel Annette Joseph-Gabriel is the John Spencer Bassett Associate Professor of Romance Studies and Associate Professor of Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies at Duke University. She is the author of Reimagining Liberation: How Black Women Transformed Citizenship in the French Empire (University of Illinois Press, 2020); co-editor of Shirley Graham Du Bois: Artist, Activist, and Author in the African Diaspora (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025); and is currently at work on her second monograph, Enslaved Childhoods: Survival and Storytelling in the Atlantic World. Her research has been supported by awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Humanities Center, among others. She currently serves as senior editor of Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International.

Loren Lee Loren Lee is a doctoral candidate in French at the University of Virginia as well as the 2024-2025 Digital Humanities Fellow of the UVA Scholars' Lab. Loren's research interests include representations of identity, women, and the body in pre-modern literature, particularly in hagiography. Her dissertation focuses on medieval manuscript studies, digital humanities methods, editing, and translation studies.

Zach Mann Zachary M. Mann is Associate Director of the Levan Institute for the Humanities and Program Coordinator for the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at the University of Southern California. He holds a PhD in English Literature from USC, where his research focused on the history of punch card systems and intellectual labor, from eighteenth-century France to the heyday of IBM computers. He has been a member of the Humanities and Critical Code Studies Lab at USC since 2019.

Mark C. Marino Mark C. Marino, Director, is a Professor (Teaching) of Writing at the University of Southern California, where he directs the Humanities and Critical Code Studies Lab. He is also a 2023-24 Generative AI Fellow. He is one of the founders of the sub-field of Critical Code Studies and has taught courses in it, published case studies of it, and authored the book, entitled Critical Code Studies (MIT 2020), which offers case studies and methods of CCS. Since 2008, he has been the Director of Communication of the Electronic Literature Organization (https://eliterature.org). He was one of ten co-authors of 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 (MIT 2013) and was a collaborator with Jessica Pressman and Jeremy Douglass on Reading Project: A Collaborative Analysis of William Poundstone's Project for Tachistoscope {Bottomless Pit} (Iowa Press 2015). He is currently finishing a multi-authored study of the first chatbot, ELIZA, forthcoming from MIT Press.

Ismaïla Mbodji Ismaïla Mbodji is a teacher-researcher in the Faculty of Sciences and Technologies of Education and Training at the Cheikh Anta Diop University of Dakar, after having been a professor of history and geography then pedagogical advisor. Holder of a doctorate in educational sciences from the UNESCO Chair in Dakar (CUSE/ISE), he is the author of numerous publications in didactics and on the teaching of history and geography.

Lee Mordechai Lee Mordechai is a Senior Lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s History Department. Much of his work concerns Late Antiquity and he has worked on FLAME for about a decade.

Ryan Nichols Ryan Nichols is a professor in the Department of Philosophy at California State University, Fullerton, in Orange County. His research is largely dedicated to understanding what makes China Chinese. He has published in journals such as Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Evolution and Human Behavior, Journal of Asian Studies, and Philosophical Quarterly.

Zeinab Parishani Zeinab Parishani is a Ph.D. student and Graduate Research Assistant at the School of Information Science & Learning Technologies (SISLT) iSchool at the University of Missouri. She is studying the use of innovative technologies such as virtual reality and video games, and she is interested in digital, media, and archival studies and human-computer interaction.

Ilia Curto Pelle Ilia Curto Pelle is a first-year PhD student at the History department of Princeton University. His primary interest lies in the study of economic networks and exchange in the Eastern Mediterranean between the 5th and 10th centuries. He has also worked with the FLAME Project in the roles of Assistant Coordinator and Project Manager since the start of 2020.

Mark Pyzyk Mark Pyzyk is Data Analyst and Facilitator at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, CA. He is also Co-Director of the Coin Finds of Ukraine project, which digitizes classical Greek coin finds on the territory of modern Ukraine. His interests span technology (ancient and modern), the digital humanities, numismatics, and ancient Greek social/political history. Recent publications include "Coercive Labouring Economies—10,000 BCE to 500 CE" (A Cultural History of Slavery and Human Trafficking, Bloomsbury 2024) and “Digital Technology in Historical Research: Contemporary Scholarly Current” (Eastern European Historical Herald, 2024).

Richard Roberts Richard Roberts is a Frances and Charles Field Professor of History Emeritus at Stanford University. He has published widely on the social and legal history of French West Africa, and he is together with Rebecca Wall, Rachel Jean-Baptiste, and Babacar Fall one of the co-director of the Senegal Liberations Project.

Marie Rodet A reader in the History of Africa at SOAS, University of London, Marie Rodet has extensively researched, taught, and published on the history of slavery in Africa. She is passionate about digital public history: she is the director of the documentary film The Diambourou: Slavery and Emancipation in Kayes – Mali (2014) and the web documentary Bouillagui: A Free Village (2020), as well as the scriptwriter of the animation film All Equal!(2024). She has also worked on a mobile game against slavery called USAWA (JIWE studios 2023) based on her research in Western Mali, and she is currently working on a new game called Umoja with UNESCO Kenya on the history of resistance to slavery along the Swahili coast.

Zack Sai Zack Sai is an undergraduate student majoring in Computer Science, with a minor in mobile app development, in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering.

Fatoumata Seck Fatoumata Seck is Assistant Professor of French and, by courtesy, of Comparative Literature at Stanford University. She teaches and researches the literatures, histories, and cultures of Africa and the African diaspora.

Alan Stahl Alan Stahl is Curator of Numismatics at Princeton University and teaches in the departments of Art & Archaeology, Classics and History. One of his first publications was in Computers and the Humanities in 1978.

Soni Wadhwa Soni Wadhwa is an Assistant Professor of English at SRM University (Andhra Pradesh, India). Soni’s research interests include spatiality, Sindhi Studies, digital archiving, and South Asian Studies.

Rebecca Wall Rebecca Wall is an assistant professor of History at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. She has published articles on the environmental and political history of French West Africa and is completing a book on the twentieth-century history Senegal River. She is co-director of the Senegal Liberations Project together with Rachel Jean-Baptiste, Babacar Fall, and Richard Roberts.

April Yao April Yao is a Master's student in Computer Science at the University of Southern California.

Christy Ye Christy Ye is a game developer and designer who creates interactive experiences around meaningful play and narratives in projects across a variety of media. She holds an MFA in Interactive Media and Game Design from the USC School of Cinematic Arts.