Transcribe Colored Conventions

Denise Burgher is the founding chair of the Historic Church and Community Engagement committee and co-chair of the Curriculum Committee at the Center for Black Digital Research. She joined the CCP team in 2016 when she spear-headed and led CCP’s national transcription outreach initiative to AME church members whose denomination and congregations hosted hundreds of convention gatherings. Denise is also co-chair of the Curriculum Committee, which designed a standards-based CCP high school curriculum for implementation in Philly schools.

Jim Casey is an assistant research professor of English at UC Santa Barbara, and the co-founding associate director of the Center for Black Digital Research. Dedicated to collaborative scholarship, his work spans current and emerging areas of Black digital humanities and public humanities. Recent publications and ongoing projects focus on critical data studies, archives, and crowdsourcing. Among other projects, he is co-founder and co-director of Colored Conventions Project and Douglass Day.

Courtney Murray is an assistant professor of English at James Madison University. Currently, her research interests involve 19th c. African American Diasporic archives and literature and how those texts engage with Black feminisms, space/time, fugitivity, and liberation. She is the Douglass Day Communications Committee Chair.

Gabrielle Sutherland is the Event and Communications Administrator for the Center for Black Digital Research. Gabrielle joined the team in August 2021, and provides comprehensive administrative support, assisting with Center administrative duties and implementing the activities of the office, along with project management contributions on the Douglass Day team.

Eden Mekonen is a PhD candidate in Geography and African Studies at Penn State where she also serves on the Douglass Day Community Engagement Committee.

Lauren Cooper joined the Colored Conventions Project (CCP) as the project manager and digital scholarship librarian in 2018. In 2020 she moved to Penn State with CCP to launch the Center for Black Digital Research (CBDR) as the Center-wide digital scholarship librarian and project manager. Lauren works with students, faculty, librarians, and partners to implement, develop, and manage digital scholarship and publishing projects. As a member of the CBDR Exec Team, she participates in strategic planning, grant writing and management, and relationship development.

Gabrielle Foreman co-directs the Center for Black Digital Research and is the Colored Convention Project’s founding faculty director. She holds a named chair at Penn State with appointments in English, African American Studies, History, and the Libraries, and is a Senior Library Research Fellow at the University of Delaware. She is a co-editor of The Colored Conventions: Black Organizing in the Nineteenth Century (UNC Press, 2021).

Justin Smith earned his PhD in English Literature and African American Studies at The Pennsylvania State University, with a focus is on political identity and solidarity in early twentieth-century African American literature. He was the Zooniverse team project leader for Douglass Day 2020-2022.