Academic Employment
Assistant Professor
Department of Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles, 2017–
Coordinator and Core Faculty Member
Program in Digital Humanities, University of California, Los Angeles, 2012–2017
Education
Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut
Ph.D., Film Studies and American Studies, 2011
Dissertation: Depth Perception: Narrative and the Body in Medical Filmmaking
Reed College, Portland, Oregon
B.A., History, December 2001
Phi Beta Kappa
Publications
Peer-Reviewed Journal and Book Articles
“Digital Humanities.” In The Craft of Criticism: Critical Media Studies in Practice, edited by Mary Celeste Kearney and Michael Kackman, 331–46. New York: Taylor & Francis, 2018.
“Khaki Fever, Charity Girls, and The End of the Road: Hostile Worlds of Sex and Commerce in an Early Sexual Hygiene Film,” Communicating Good Health: Movies, Medicine, and the Cultures of Risk in the Twentieth Century (University of Rochester, 2018)
Posner, Miriam, and Marika Cifor. “Generative Tensions: Building a Digital Project on Early African American Race Film.” American Quarterly 70, no. 3 (September 29, 2018): 709–14.
“Tracing a Community of Practice: A Database of Early African-American Race Film” (with Marika Cifor), Moving Image 17.2 (Fall 2017).
“The Early African-American Race Film Database” (with Marika Cifor, Hanna Girma, Wiliam Lam, and Shanya Norman), Journal of Open Humanities Data.
“Data as Media” (with Lauren Klein), Feminist Media Histories 3:3 (Summer 2017).
“What’s Next: The Radical, Unrealized Potential of Digital Humanities,” and “Here and There: Building Community in the Digital Humanities,” in Lauren Klein and Matthew Gold, ed., Debates in the Digital Humanities (University of Minnesota, 2016).
“How is a Digital Project Like a Film?” in Charles Acland and Eric Hoyt, ed., The Arclight Guide to Media Studies and Digital Humanities (REFRAME, 2016).
“No Half Measures: Overcoming Common Challenges to Doing Digital Humanities in the Library,” Journal of Library Administration 53:1 (January 2013).
“Think Talk Make Do: Power and the Digital Humanities,” Journal of Digital Humanities 1:2 (June 2012).
SPEC Survey on Digital Humanities Services in Libraries (with Tim Bryson, Frances Maloy, Alain St. Pierre, and Stewart Varner), Association of Research Libraries, March 2011.
“Communicating Disease: Germ Theory and Narrative in Thomas Edison’s Red Cross Seal Films,” in Marsha Orgeron et al., Learning with the Lights Out: An Educational Film Reader (Oxford, 2011).
Grant Awards
Principal investigator, Beyond the Digitized Slide Library Summer Institute on Digital Humanities and Art History, Getty Foundation, $181,972 (2014, UCLA)
Principal investigator, Beyond the Digitized Slide Library Summer Institute on Digital Humanities and Art History, Getty Foundation, $185,677 (2013, UCLA)
Co-principal investigator, Advancing Project-Based Learning through Apprenticeships and Capstone Courses in the Digital Humanities Minor, UCLA Office of Instructional Development, $37,500 (2012, UCLA)
Co-author, The Digital Scholarship Commons: A New Approach for Digital Scholarship, Mellon Foundation, $694,053 (2011, Emory University)
Co-author, Online Access to the Silent Film Era Collection, National Endowment for the Humanities, $250,000 (2008, Museum of the Moving Image)
Selected Invited Presentations
Keynotes
Utah Digital Humanities Symposium, February 2019
Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science, November 2018
Archivists and Librarians in the History of the Health Sciences, Los Angeles, May 2018
Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities Annual Meeting, Los Angeles, March 2018
Netherlands American Studies Association, Middelburg, Netherlands, September 2016
Australasian Association for Digital Humanities, Tasmania, Australia, June 2016
Making Meaning with Data in the Humanities and Social Sciences, Grinnell College, June 2016
Digital Pedagogy Institute, University of Toronto-Scarborough, August 2015
Public Knowledge Project Conference, Simon Fraser University, August 2015
Keystone Digital Humanities Conference, University of Pennsylvania, July 2015
Harvard Purdue Data Management Symposium, Cambridge, Mass., June 2015
Digital Frontiers, University of North Texas, September 2014
Recent Invited Talks
Ohio University, March 2019
UC Riverside, March 2019
University of Colorado, Boulder, February 2019
Albright College, November 2018
University of Wisconsin-Madison, October 2018
Australian National University, Canberra, August 2018
University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, May 2018
County of L.A. Public Libraries Emerging Technology Think Tank, April 2018
University of Chicago, March 2018
University of Southern California, February 2018
UC San Diego, January 2018
Loyola Marymount University, January 2018
University of Shenzhen, China, December 2017
University of Texas at Austin, June 2017
Stanford University, April 2017
Rochester Institute of Technology, April 2017
University of Colorado, Boulder, February 2017
Northwestern University, September 2016
UC Berkeley, History and Theory of New Media Lecture Series, September 2016
Claremont College Digital Humanities Symposium, May 2016
National Library of Medicine, April 2016
Reed College, April 2016
University of San Francisco Data Visualization Speaker Series, March 2016
New York Academy of Medicine, New York, NY, February 2016
Bard College Experimental Humanities Series, February 2016
UC Irvine Data Science and Digital Humanities Symposium, February 2016
University of Kansas Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities, January 2016
UC Merced Center for the Humanities, November 2015
UC Santa Cruz Institute for Humanities Research, November 2015
Yale University American Studies Department, New Haven, CT, May 2015
New York University Library, May 2015
Concordia College, Moorhead, Minnesota, November 2014
Middlebury College, April 2015
Amherst College, April 2015
Fordham University Department of American Studies, April 2014
City University of New York, Graduate Center, April 2014
Recent Conference Presentations
Society for the Social Studies of Science, Sydney, Australia, August 2018
Command and Control Conference, New York University, April 2018
Digital Humanities Annual Conference, Mexico City, July 2018
Organization of American Historians, April 2018
Society for Cinema and Media Studies, March 2018
Related Professional Experience
Emory University Libraries, Atlanta, Georgia
Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Digital Scholarship Commons
June 2010–January 2012
Key in researching, designing, planning, and managing a new center for digital scholarship. Co-wrote successful grant ($694,053) to the Mellon Foundation to fund the center. Supervised student and full-time employees. Conducted outreach and offered consultations to graduate students and faculty members.
Museum of the Moving Image, Astoria, New York
Associate Curator of the Collection
January 2007–January 2008
Curated, maintained, and developed MMI’s collection of 125,000 artifacts. Organized digital and physical exhibitions. Co-wrote successful $250,000 NEH grant. Managed interns, researched artifacts, and coordinated incoming donations.
Service
Editorial Board Member, 2019–present, The Moving Image: The Journal of the Association for Moving Image Archivists
Member, Digital Strategy Roundtable, 2019–2022, The Library of Congress
Advisory Board Member, 2018–present, American Philosophical Society Center for Digital Scholarship
Advisory Board Member, 2018–present, Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaborative (HASTAC)
Digital Visiting Committee Member, 2019, The Getty Trust
Advisory Board Member, The Eugenic Rubicon: California’s Sterilization Stories, 2016
Advisory Board Member, Digging Deeper, Reaching Further: Libraries Empowering Users to Mine the HathiTrust Digital Library Resources, 2016–2019
Editorial Board, Digital Project Review, 2016–2019,American Quarterly
Executive Council member, 2014–2017, Association for Computing and the Humanities
Peer Reviewer, Preservation & Access Research & Development Program, September 2014, National Endowment for the Humanities Office of Preservation and Access
Selection committee member, 2014, Council on Library and Information Resources Dissertation Fellowships
Peer reviewer, 2013–Present, Digital Humanities Annual Meeting
Peer reviewer, current, Routledge, Palgrave Macmillan, and the Digital Humanities Quarterly
Special advisor, 2012–2013, National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education
General editor, 2012–2016, The Programming Historian (an open-access resource for teaching programming to historians)
Program committee member, 2012, Society for Cinema and Media Studies
Advisory board member, History Project, 2011–2012, Research Support Services for Scholars (An Ithaka S+R Program)
Peer reviewer, Start-Up Grants, 2011, National Endowment for the Humanities Office of Digital Humanities