2025 Call for Applications

The Caribbean Digital Scholarship Collective (CDSC) invites applications for its week-long residential digital humanities institute, to be held at The University of the West Indies, Mona Campus, in June 2025. The Caribbean Digital Scholarship Summer Institute (CDSsi), generously supported by a Mellon Foundation grant, first ran in June 2023 and will be held annually through summer 2025, its final year under the grant.

Key Facts

• Dates: 8-14 June 2025
• Venue: University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica
• Application deadline: 31 January 2025
• Acceptance notification: 31 March 2025

Background

To secure a viable future for digital scholarship in Caribbean Studies, we need a more expansive pool of talent. Given this need, the CDSsi aims to train scholars interested in approaching Caribbean Studies and digital scholarship as organically integrated fields of inquiry and engagement. Other DH institutes have proven to be insufficiently accessible to our Caribbean communities for various reasons, including high cost, logistics of international travel, and a tendency to center Europe, Canada, and the US. The Caribbean Digital Scholarship summer institute attends to these problems by providing training to scholars, at all levels, working at the intersections of Caribbean Studies and digital humanities. In this third year of the CDSsi, the course offerings will be:

Introduction to Maps and Visualizations

- With Alexander Gil (Yale University) and Andreina Soto (Yale University)

Digital Publishing

- With Kelly Baker Josephs (University of Miami) and Michael Soriano (University of Miami)

Building Caribbean Digital Archives

- With Nicole N. Aljoe (Northeastern University) and Sonya Donaldson (Colby College)

In order to nurture an inclusive and healthy Caribbean digital humanities scholarly and pedagogical community, we must grapple explicitly with the obstacles to cross-national collaboration. We have therefore situated our summer institute at the University of the West Indies, Mona, a site that facilitates travel and in-person participation from both those situated in the Caribbean and in the North American diaspora. Funding from the Mellon Foundation allows for this model of networking and community-building that encourages an understanding of both the continental US and the wider Americas as generative sites of knowledge production. Several members of the Caribbean Digital Scholarship Collective have organized shorter variations of events based on similar community-building models, as with The Caribbean Digital (TCD) conference series and a number of THATCamps (The Humanities and Technology Camps) organized in the Caribbean.

Institute Particulars and Who Should Apply

For each year funded by the Mellon Foundation, the CDSsi admits up to 30 fellows across 3 courses (10 fellows per course). The summer institute welcomes applications from all scholars working within Caribbean studies. This includes full and part-time college and university faculty, independent scholars, librarians, archivists, and graduate students. Applicants may be working in any academic discipline (or across disciplines) but should have some previous experience with digital humanities. A major consideration in the selection of fellows will be the applicant's plans for Caribbean digital work in the next two years. A select number of seats in each course will be reserved for applicants from the Caribbean region, therefore scholars residing in the Caribbean are especially encouraged to apply. As summer 2025 concludes the Caribbean Digital Scholarship Summer Institute (CDSsi) under the Mellon Foundation grant, previous participants from 2023 and 2024 are eligible to apply for a course they have not yet taken.

The tentative schedule for each day of each course includes a three-hour morning session and a three-hour afternoon session with a lunch break between the two. Fellows may participate in a local field trip mid-week. At the end of the week, fellows will present the projects or project proposals they have developed during the week. CDSsi is a residential institute (all participants will reside on the UWI, Mona campus for the week) and instruction for all three courses will be conducted in person and primarily in English.

Travel and accommodation

The Caribbean Digital Scholarship Collective will cover travel and accommodations for each fellow selected. The CDSsi supports travel fees of up to $1,000 (USD) for each fellow to attend the institute in person. Additionally, a week of private housing and meals on the University of the West Indies, Mona campus will be provided for each fellow at no additional cost. There are no additional fees associated with attending the Caribbean Digital Scholarship Summer Institute.

Application Procedure

We invite applications from full- and part-time college and university faculty, independent scholars, librarians, archivists, and graduate students at all career stages. To apply, complete the form linked below, indicating which courses are of interest to you in the order of your preference. Please attach a copy of your CV/resume (no more than 5 pages) along with a statement of intent (750-1,000 words) detailing why the CDSsi is of interest and how you envision it would further your scholarship and pedagogy. Should you have a particular project for which one of our courses would be well suited, please describe this project in your statement of intent. We require that the CV and statement of intent be submitted as one PDF.

Letters of recommendation are not required for application to the CDSsi and will not be accepted.

Information session

We held an information session about the Caribbean Digital Scholarship Summer Institute on Thursday, January 16, 2025, via Zoom. To view the session recording and a list of frequently asked questions, please click here.

Questions about the Caribbean Digital Scholarship summer institute may be sent to:

• Kelly Baker Josephs, CDSsi Director
• Gabrielle Jean-Louis, CDSsi Graduate Assistant