The RAD Project Team

Faith Barter, Assistant Professor of English, University of Oregon 
Faith Barter works on nineteenth-century African American literature and its relationship to the legal history of slavery in the United States. A former lawyer, her current book project theorizes antebellum African American literary production as a form of legal advocacy. Among other things, that project examines Nat Turner’s 1831 Rebellion.

Jonathan Cain, Associate University Librarian for Research and Learning, Columbia University
Jonathan Cain’s work focuses on increasing equitable access to digital scholarship and data services and digital collections. He designs data and digital education programs, focusing on equitable access and social justice as essential components. His current research centers on understanding and interrogating the inequity in data & technology cultures and the role of libraries as organizations for the public good, privacy in education, and social justice and equity. Jonathan has held positions at Hunter College (City University of New York), New York University, and the University of Oregon. Additionally, Jonathan has shared his higher education, data, and cultural informatics expertise through serving on the Board of Directors for Code for Science & Society and Oregon Black Pioneers. Jonathan holds an MSLIS from Pratt Institute, an MA in Africana Studies from New York University, and a BS in Anthropology from the College of Charleston.

Ulrick Casimir, Career Instructor, Department of English, University of Oregon
A native of North Carolina, Ulrick Casimir has taught writing, literature, and film at colleges and universities across the country.  He holds a B.A. from North Carolina State University and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro; he also holds an M.A. and a Ph.D., both in English, from the University of Oregon, where for the past several years he has taught writing and film for the English department, for Cinema Studies, and for Clark Honors College. Ulrick’s dissertation, Conceptualizing the Caribbean:  Reexportation and Anglophone Caribbean Cultural Products, attempts to unpack the historical dynamic of reexportation, whereby Caribbean artists attain success at home by first achieving renown abroad. The project asserts that this dialectical exchange between British and American conceptualizations of the Anglophone Caribbean has informed the international popular and scholarly reception of Caribbean cultural products, and the forms in which writers and filmmakers of the region represent the place that they are “from.” The project also explores, primarily through the works of Samuel Selvon and Horace Ove, the ways in which those same writers and filmmakers have resisted the translational and compositional constraints that attend the dynamic of reexportation. Ulrick’s scholarly work has appeared in the film journal Jump Cut; his short fiction has most recently appeared in Plainsongs. Children of the Night: Stories, his first collection of short stories, was published by Corpus Callosum Press in spring of 2018.

Heidi Kaufman, Associate Professor of English, University of Oregon 
Heidi Kaufman specializes in nineteenth-century British and Caribbean literature, Digital Humanities, and Jewish Studies. Most recently she co-edited a volume of essays (with Sarah Casteel), Caribbean Jewish Crossings: Literary History and Creative Practice (University of Virginia, 2019). She is completing a book on nineteenth-century writing about London’s East End and beginning a new project on literary and visual depictions of the Morant Bay Rebellion (1865). Heidi serves on the Advisory Board for the Digital Library of the Caribbean (DLoC), a grant-funded Digital Humanities Caribbean archive project.

Thanh Nguyen, Assistant Professor of Computer and Information Science, University of Oregon 
Thanh Nguyen specializes in Artificial Intelligence. Her work is motivated by real-world societal problems, particularly in the areas of Sustainability, Public Safety and Security, Cybersecurity, and Public Health. She has been working on (i) building new behavioral models of human decision-making for adversarial reasoning and applying machine learning techniques to learn the models and (ii) developing advanced game-theoretic solutions for strategic reasoning in a multi-agent adversarial environment in which multiple agents with conflicting goals and opposing benefits interact with each other.

Thien Nguyen, Assistant Professor of Computer and Information Science, University of Oregon
Thien Nguyen specializes in information extraction, natural language processing, and machine learning. His work features the recent technological advances on deep learning and artificial intelligence to extract information, recognize patterns and infer knowledge from heterogeneous data sources.

Erik Steiner, Co-Director Spatial History Project, CESTA, Stanford University
Erik Steiner is the co-founder of the Spatial History Project at the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA) at Stanford University and specializes in the development of digital humanities projects, with expertise in data wrangling, data visualization, interaction design, spatial analysis and cartography. The body of his work sits at the intersection of technology, creative arts, and academic scholarship in the humanities and social, and environmental sciences. Steiner previously held a position in the Department of Geography at the UO, where he contributed to the award-winning interactive Atlas of Oregon and several other digital projects.

 

The RAD project has benefitted from the expertise of the following scholars

Leslie Alexander, Associate Professor of History, Arizona State University

Viet Lai, PhD student, Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Oregon

Czander Tan, PhD student, Department of English; MA Student Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Oregon