Jeri Wieringa

As assistant director, Jeri focuses on issues around data, research infrastructure, and educational models for the digital humanities.

A historian of American religion, Jeri’s research focuses on the application of computational methods within historical research and on the intersection of technology, gender, and culture. Her scholarship engages with issues of data construction and curation, machine learning, and natural language processing with historical sources.

She is currently working on a The Tie that Binds, a book and digital project based on her dissertation, A Gospel of Health and Salvation: Modeling the Religious Culture of Seventh-day Adventism, 1843-1920. The project offers a history of the Seventh-day Adventist church through their uses of print, as well as presents a digital scholarly edition of the periodical literature of the denomination. The digital project is an experiment in curating, describing, analyzing, and visualizing a historical corpus in a way to foregrounds the contextual, contingent, and constructed nature of the data. She is also working on a data project with Zoe LeBlanc to study the DH community on Github. She has written on data in religious studies in Digital Humanities and Libraries and Archives in Religious Studies, on digital dissertations within the historical profession (with Celeste Sharpe and Zoe LeBlanc) in Debates in Digital Humanities, and has presented at the American Historical Association, the American Academy of Religion, DH, and the Association for Computers and the Humanities.

Prior to joining the CDH, Jeri was assistant professor in the department of religious studies at The University of Alabama where she taught classes in DH as well as content courses. She was the founding director of the REL Digital Lab, a digital humanities lab created in 2021 for supporting the research and teaching of the department. She received her PhD in History from George Mason University in 2019, completing a fully digital dissertation. She worked previously as the digital publishing production lead with the George Mason University Libraries and as a research assistant at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media on projects such as Omeka and PressForward.