March 28, 2024

McClurken Presents on Digital Initiatives

AAC&U

At the 100th Annual Conference of the American Association of Colleges and Universities, Jeffrey McClurken, Professor of History and American Studies and Special Assistant to the Provost for Teaching, Technology, and Innovation, co-presented as part of a panel entitled, Century America: A Multi-Campus Digital History Collaboration.  McClurken presented with Leah Tams ‘14, Professor Ellen Pearson of UNC-Asheville, and Jennifer Marks, a senior at Truman State University on Century America, an online course sponsored by COPLAC and the Teagle Foundation for 13 students from nine schools that resulted in a public digital history project about local communities during the Great War and Influenza Epidemic. See more about Fredericksburg and the other communities at Http://centuryamerica.org/

EduCon

Two days later, McClurken co-led a discussion about students and digital identity at EduCon 2.7, a conference about technology, education, and project-based learning. McClurken talked about the opportunities that UMWBlogs and Domain of One’s Own creates for students at UMW to create, refine, reflect, and expand on their presence in the digital world as students, as learners, as scholars, and as graduates. He partnered with teachers and edtech leaders from K to 12 in this conversation.

McClurken Presents at AHA National Conference

2015 AHA Conference

2015 AHA Conference

At the Annual American Historical Association Conference, Jeffrey McClurken, Professor of History and American Studies and Special Assistant to the Provost for Teaching, Technology, and Innovation, presented in a number of venues.  He ran a two-hour workshop on “Advanced Digital History Pedagogy” at the Getting Started in Digital History session.  He presented “Student Historians and a Domain of One’s Own” in the Digital History Pedagogy session.  He co-organized a Digital Drop-In Session where anyone could come by and ask experts in digital humanities questions about a new or ongoing projects.  McClurken also was asked to comment with other current and former department chairs on a draft statement from the AHA’s Ad Hoc Committee on Professional Evaluation of Digital Scholarship.  He ended the conference by leading sessions at THATCamp AHA–an unconference exploring the intersection of humanities and technology–on the future of THATCamp and on teaching digital history to undergraduates.

McClurken Gives Plenary Address at Truman State

On April 14 and 15, Jeffrey McClurken, chair and professor of History and American Studies, visited fellow COPLAC school Truman State University in Kirksville, Mo. McClurken was the plenary speaker for Truman’s Student Research Conference, presenting on “Students as Digitally Enabled Scholars: Undergraduate Research in the Information Age.”  He also presented to TSU’s Library and Information Technology units, and led a discussion in a seminar on the Politics and Literature of War.

McClurken Presents on the Detective and the Asylum

On April 12, Jeffrey McClurken, Professor and Chair of History and American Studies presented a paper, “Murder at the Asylum: A Pinkerton Detective in Readjuster Virginia,” as part of the panel, “Infiltrating Dangerous Spaces: The Rise of the Detective in the Late Nineteenth Century,” at the Organization of American Historians Annual Conference in Atlanta, Ga.  McClurken was also part of a C-SPAN interview at the conference on the role of detectives in the 19th and 20th Centuries.

Jeffrey McClurken Presents at Three Workshops

Over the last month, Jeff McClurken, Chair of History & American Studies, has run digital history workshops at three institutions. In early May he worked with Duke’s Cathy Davidson to run a workshop at Davidson College to help faculty there develop a “Digital Studies Program.” In late May, he ran a multi-day workshop on “Developing the Digital Liberal Arts” for faculty and staff at UNC-Asheville, a fellow COPLAC institution. Finally, he was invited to run a workshop about “Teaching Digital History” at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University as part of the THATCamp Humanities and Technology Conference in early June. At THATCamp he also proposed and led a discussion session on “A SWAT Team for Rescuing Old Digital Humanities Sites.”