05/27/2026
Congratulations to Lexus Root, Brianna Rose DeValk, Dana Hanley and Henrique Cassol Leal on being named digital humanities fellows for summer 2026!
The program supports their research, scholarship, professional development, and creative production skills.
“Our goal with this program is to both support DH student projects and foster meaningful cross-disciplinary collaboration," Carrie Heitman, director of the Digital Humanities Summer Fellowship, said. "So many technical barriers are lower now than ever before. Students have access to things like AI-driven coding assistants that can really accelerate project development. I’m excited to help support another group of extraordinary scholars this summer."
Root is a second-year doctoral student in English at Nebraska. He also received a Bachelor of Arts in English from Nebraska. His fellowship project aims to develop a computational measure of sexual explicitness and violence in mid-20th century gay erotic fiction, relying on a corpus of thousands of 'gay pulp' novels.
DeValk is a fourth-year doctoral student in history at Nebraska. She received a Bachelor of Arts in history pedagogy from California Lutheran University and a Master of Arts in history from Minnesota State University, Mankato. This summer, she will work on “Citizenship Taken: Recovering Married Women’s Citizenship on the Northern Great Plains, 1907-1967,” a relational database that brings together seemingly disparate historical records to reconstruct the identities and stories of American-born women whose birthright citizenship was taken following their marriage to an unnaturalized immigrant during the early 20th century.
Hanley is a first-year master's student in modern languages at Nebraska. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Germanic languages and literatures and a Bachelor of Science in education from the University of Kansas. Her Fellowship project, “‘Forever Undivided’: Mapping Connections Between the Failed 1848 Revolution in Schleswig-Holstein and Successful Civic Institutions in Nebraska,” utilizes ArcGIS StoryMaps to create a digital public history platform. Her work traces migration from Schleswig-Holstein following and documents the subsequent emergence of German-American civic institutions in Nebraska.
Leal is a doctoral candidate in philosophy at Nebraska. He received a Master of Arts in philosophy from the University of Missouri–St. Louis and a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil). His fellowship project, “The AI Moral Status Atlas: Mapping Concepts, Positions, and Argument Pathways in Contemporary Debate,” builds an “atlas” of key concepts, positions, arguments and objections in the debate about whether and how AI systems could have moral status.
They will spend the summer in a shared workspace at the Dinsdale Family Learning Commons under Heitman's mentorship. At a mid-summer project showcase, they will receive feedback from faculty and staff. In September, the students will present their final projects in a public DH Afternoons event sponsored by the center.
University of Nebraska-Lincoln Department of History
UNL Modern Languages and Literatures
Nebraska Philosophy
UNL Department of English
CDRH
UNL Anthropology
