Feminist Digital Humanities: Intersections in Practice

In April 2025 Feminist Digital Humanities: Intersections in Practice was published by The University of Illinois Press. It is an edited collection (which is available open access and can be downloaded here) divided into three main sections: Readings, Infrastructures and Pedagogies.

The thread that runs through this collection is a theorisation of feminist DH practice as sites of possibility for exploring, exposing, and revaluing marginalised forms of knowledge production through new modes and processes of meaning making.

Each chapter also reflects on what it means to be a feminist and a technologist through definitions of feminisms that are brought into conversation with DH scholarship. Feminist DH practices are presented as sites of possibility for exploring, exposing, and revaluing marginalised forms of knowledge production by enacting new modes and processes of meaning making. An overriding focus of the collection is to demonstrate how feminist lenses attuned to issues of intersectionality and gender can uncover structural inequities and present opportunities for social and intellectual change.

This talk will have a three-part focus. The first part will reflect on the collection as a whole, and how it intersects with current feminist thought and DH practice. The second part will explore the Readings section through the chapter Feminist DH: A Historical Perspective Excavating the Lives of Women of the Past by Monika Barget and Susan Schreibman which explores how the Irish digital humanities project Letters 1916–1923 adopted a feminist approach to surface marginalized women’s voices in a heterogeneous historical collection of letters dominated by male voices. The third part will focus on Jenny Bergenmar’s co-authored chapter Infrastructures for Diversity: Feminist and Queer Interventions in Nordic Digital Humanities from the Infrastructures Section, which explores how DH infrastructures in institutional frameworks can make space for feminist, queer, and activist perspectives, methods, and collaborations.

Speakers:
Monika Barget (University of Maastricht),
Jenny Bergenmar (University of Gothenburg),
Susan Schreibman (University of Maastricht)

Registration link.

Monika Barget is an early modern historian and digital humanist specializing in the political history of the eighteenth century, visual cultures, and spatial history. From 2017 to 2018, she contributed to the Letters 1916–1923 and Ignite projects at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. Following postdoctoral work in Mainz, she joined the History Department of Maastricht University as an assistant professor in August 2021.

Jenny Bergenmar is a professor of comparative literature at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. She is a literary history scholar who has previously worked with digital scholarly editing and archival materials through digitisation and crowdsourcing. She is currently principal investigator of the research infrastructure project QUEERLIT database: Metadata Development and Searchability for LGBTQI Literary Heritage (2021–2023).

Susan Schreibman is a professor of digital arts and culture at Maastricht University and a Co-Director of DARIAH. Her current research projects include: PURE3D2.0 and Contested Memories: The Battle of Mount Street Bridge.