Janet Jakobsen
Faculty Director, Digital Humanities Center
Janet R. Jakobsen is Chair and Claire Tow Professor of Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. She served for fifteen years as Director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women (BCRW), and she has also served as Barnard's Dean for Faculty Diversity and Development and Chair of the President's Committee on Online and On-Campus Learning (COOL). As Director of BCRW, Professor Jakobsen founded the webjournal, Scholar & Feminist Online (http://bcrw.barnard.edu/publication-sections/sf-online/), along with the New Feminist Solutions series of activist research projects with community-based organizations (http://bcrw.barnard.edu/publication-sections/nfs/).
She is the author of Working Alliances and the Politics of Difference: Diversity and Feminist Ethics and with Ann Pellegrini she co-wrote Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance and co-edited Secularisms. With Elizabeth Castelli she co-edited Interventions: Academics and Activists Respond to Violence. Her current book project, "Why Sex?: Religion, Secularism and Possibilities for Justice," is forthcoming from New York University Press.
Professor Jakobsen has held fellowships from the American Association of University Women, the Udall Center for Public Policy at the University of Arizona, the Center for the Humanities at Wesleyan University, and the Center for the Study of Values in Public Life at Harvard Divinity School. She has taught as a Visiting Professor at Wesleyan University and Harvard University. Before entering the academy, she was a policy analyst and organizer in Washington, D.C.
Madiha Choksi
Digital Scholarship Librarian, Center Service Lead
Madiha Zahrah is the Digital Humanities technologist and librarian at the Barnard Library. Madiha was formerly interning at Columbia’s Digital Social Science Center where she instructed Python coding labs, designed 3D printed artifacts for research and scholarship, tested data visualization tools amongst other creative projects. As a technocrat, Madiha focuses on the intersection of information access, excess, and privacy and prioritizes the use and instruction of Open and Free sourced materials. Madiha is dedicated to critically engaging with born digital information, and digital tools and resources in an effort to maintain individual autonomy in an increasingly wired existence. She is excited to encourage critical thinking and research at the Digital Humanities Center by ushering students and faculty into 21st century research models that simultaneously challenge and strengthen existing relationships with information and technology.
Madiha holds an M.A. in Human Rights from Columbia University, and an M.S. in Information Science, and an Honors B.A. from the University of Toronto. Madiha’s office is located in the Digital Humanities Center, first floor of the MCTL, and can be reached at machoksi@barnard.edu.
Sylvia Korman
Post-Baccalaureate Fellow, Digital Humanities Center
As the Digital Humanities Center’s Post-Baccalaureate Fellow, Sylvia is responsible for consulting with and advising individual student researchers on their projects in the Digital Humanities. They are also responsible for documenting Barnard’s past and ongoing Digital Humanities projects, managing the DHC’s social media, and assisting the students, faculty, and staff across curricula in building the Digital Humanities at Barnard.
Sylvia graduated in 2018 with a BA in English from Barnard College, where they ran a Shakespeare troupe and worked as a Writing Fellow. In additional to the Digital Humanities, they are interested in Renaissance Drama and writing pedagogy.
Sylvia can be reached at skorman@barnard.edu -- please don’t hesitate to get in touch!
Miriam Neptune
Director of Teaching, Learning, and Digital Scholarship
Miriam Neptune is the Director of Teaching Learning and Digital Scholarship. At Barnard, and also at Smith College, where she served as Digital Scholarship Librarian from 2015-2018, Miriam has spearheaded projects including creating space in the library for social justice conversations, through pop-up installations such as Undesign the Redline the Black Unicorn Project, and Caribbean-focused collaborations with the Barnard Center for Research on Women, as well as Barnard faculty members Kaiama Glover and Maja Horn's Hispaniola Critical Inquiry Lab.
Miriam was raised in California, and attended Pomona College where she majored in Media Studies and Black Studies. She has a Masters Degree in Cinema Studies from NYU, with a focus on documentary film. She went on to teach media studies courses in New York City High Schools and became the Director of the High School Documentary Workshop at the Educational Video Center from 2004 - 2008. She also worked for several years as the communications coordinator for Haitian Women for Haitian Refugees, creating videos focused on race, migration, and xenophobia in the Americas. Her MLS is from St. John's University.
She was previously the Digital Scholarship Librarian at Smith College, where she consulted on multifaceted DH projects such as the Domestic Workers History Timeline. As an instructional technologist, and then manager of IMATS at Barnard from 2011-2015, Miriam was a key collaborator an lead on the Versailles video, German Telenovelas, Translating Hispaniola, and the Barnard Arsenic Awareness Project - providing support for curriculum design as well as media production instruction. Miriam is available for project management consultations at mneptune@barnard.edu.