REL Adds New Faculty Member

Jeri Wieringa head shotThe Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama is extremely pleased to announce that Dr. Jeri E. Wieringa — a digital historian and affiliate faculty member with the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University — will be joining the faculty as a tenure-track Assistant Professor for the start of the Fall 2020 semester. She received her Ph.D. in History from George Mason University (2019); her M.A. in Religion, with a concentration in the History of Christianity, from Yale Divinity School (2011); and her B.A from Calvin College, with double majors in Philosophy and English (2008).

Dr. Wieringa’s work, which takes place at the intersection of digital humanities and American religious history, focuses on the implications of computational technologies in the analysis of large archival collections. Her current research not only evaluates computational methods for research in the humanities but also examines interface design for digital humanities projects and develops methods for archiving and preserving digital scholarship.

She has worked on a wide number of grant-funded digital humanities projects, including Digital Humanities Now, the Journal of Digital Humanities, and Omeka, and is co-creator of DH Bridge, an open curriculum introducing computational methods for humanities scholars. She has presented her research at the annual meetings of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations, American Historical Association, and the American Academy of Religion. She worked previously as the Digital Publishing Production Lead with Mason Publishing Group, part of the George Mason University Libraries.

Dr. Wieringa will be teaching courses in REL’s undergraduate and graduate programs (digital skills are one of the cornerstones of the M.A. degree), starting with REL 315 Digital Humanities in Religious Studies in the Fall 2020 semester (a course piloted this past Fall semester and which is open to students across the university).

As phrased by our Chair, “Her expertise in not only using but also in building digital tools for use in humanities research enhances our ability of bringing innovative and effective analytic skills to all of our students.”