a photo of Amy Earhart
  • Associate Professor
Scholars@TAMU Google Scholar Profile
Research Areas
  • Race and Ethnicity Studies
  • African American and African Diaspora Literature
  • Digital Humanities
  • Information Studies
  • 20th-Century American
  • 19th-Century American
  • Material Culture Studies
  • Book History

Biography

Amy E. Earhart is Associate Professor of English and affiliated faculty of Africana Studies at Texas A&M University. A 2020 Texas A&M University Presidential Impact Fellow and a 2019 Texas A&M University Arts & Humanities Fellow, Earhart has participated in grants and fellowship received from the NEH, ACLS, and the Mellon Foundation. In 2020, Earhart received a NEH-Mellon Fellowship for Digital Publication for her book length digital project “Digital Humanities and the Infrastructures of Race in African-American Literature.” She has also won numerous teaching awards, including the University Distinguished Achievement Award from The Association of Former Students and Texas A&M University.

Involved with digital humanities scholarship since 2003, Earhart’s scholarship has focused on examining infrastructures of technology and their impact and replication of “race,” building infrastructure for digital humanities work, embedding digital humanities projects within the classroom, and tracing the history and futures of dh, with a particular interest in the way that dh and Black studies intersect. Her digital projects are constructed to expand access to Black humanities materials, as is the case with projects The Millican Massacre, 1868, DIBB: The Digital Black Bibliographic Project, and “Alex Haley’s Malcolm X: ‘The Malcolm X I knew’ and notecards from The Autobiography of Malcolm X” (a collaborative project with undergraduate and graduate students published in Scholarly Editing).

Earhart has published scholarship on a variety of digital humanities topics, with work that includes a monograph Traces of Old, Uses of the New: The Emergence of Digital Literary Studies (U Michigan Press 2015), a co-edited collection The American Literature Scholar in the Digital Age (U Michigan Press 2010), and a number of articles and book chapters in volumes including the Debates in Digital Humanities series, DHQ, DSH: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Digital Studies/Le champ numérique, and Textual Cultures.

Her current book, “Digital Literary Redlining: African American Anthologies, Digital Humanities, and the Canon” Stanford UP, forthcoming. She is also working on a monograph project focused on the Millican Massacre.

 

Selected Advisory, Executive, and Organization Boards:

2023-2026: Member. Board of Directors. Member Awards and Education Committees. Humanities Texas. 

2022-2025: Elected Forum Delegate. TM Bibliography and Scholarly Editing. MLA.

2021-2023: Member. Advisory Board. The Wayfinder Project: Revealing Black Print Culture to a Linked World. Emory University.

2021-Present: Member. Advisory Board. Journal of Computational Literary Studies (JCLS).

2020-Present: Member, Advisory Board. 1977 National Women’s Conference. Leandra R. Zarnow and Nancy Beck Young, eds. University of Houston.

2020-Present: Member. Editorial Board. Scholarly Editing Journal. Association for Documentary Editing.

2020-Present: Member. Editorial Board. Cambridge Elements in Digital Literary Studies. Cambridge UP.

2020-2022: Member. Advisory Board. Scholar-Curated Worksets for Analysis, Reuse & Dissemination (SCWAReD). HathiTrust Research Center (Indiana University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) and the Project on the History of Black Writing (University of Kansas).

2020-Present: Member. Advisory Board. Scholarly Editing Journal. Association for Documentary Editing.

2020-Present: Member. Editorial Board. Cambridge Elements in Digital Literary Studies. Cambridge UP. 

2020-2022: Co-Chair. Committee on Scholarly Editions. MLA.

2018-19: Mentor. Kenton Rambsy, Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowship Program. 

2017-Present: Member. Friends of the African American Library at the Gregory School. Houston Public Library. Houston, Texas.

 

Research Interests

Orcid

  • Digital humanities
  • Africana and African-American literature
  • 19th-century American literature and culture

 

Research Areas

  • Race and Ethnicity Studies
  • African American and African Diaspora Literature
  • Digital Humanities
  • Material Culture Studies
  • 20th-Century American
  • Book History
  • Information Studies
  • 19th-Century American

Educational Background

  • Ph.D., Texas A&M University, 1999
  • M.A., The University of Tennessee, 1993
  • B.A., Lebanon Valley College, 1991

Awards & Honors

  • 2024-2025: “The Millican Massacre: Newspaper Transmission and Extension of Reconstruction Racial Violence.” Kate B. and Hall J. Peterson Short-Term Visiting Fellowship. American Antiquarian Society. Worcester, Massachusetts.

    2024: “The Millican Massacre: Newspaper Transmission and the Extension of Reconstruction Racial Violence.” Faculty Grant. Race and Ethnic Studies Institute. Texas A&M University. 

    2024: with Lawrence Smith. “The Millican Massacre.” Stone of Hope Award. The Ministers Justice Coalition of Texas and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference of Tarrant County, Texas.

    2021-2023: Consultant and participant. PI: Maryemma Graham. “Black Book Interactive Project.” NEH Humanities Collections and Research Resources.

    2021-2023: Advisory Board Member, participant. “Democratizing Politics: Mapping the Stories and Significance of the 1977 National Women’s Conference.” NEH Collaborative Research Grant. 

    2020-22: Participant. “Scholar-Curated Worksets for Analysis, Re-use, and Dissemination.” HathiTrust Research Center and project PIs, Professors John Walsh (Indiana), Stephen Downie (Illinois), and Maryemma Graham (Kansas). Mellon Foundation.

  • 2020: NEH-Mellon Fellowship for Digital Publication conferred by National Endowment for the Humanities – (Washington D.C., District of Columbia, United States) – for “Digital Humanities and the Infrastructures of Race in African-American Literature.” 2020.
  • 2020: Presidential Impact Fellowship. Texas A&M University.
  • 2020:  Participant. Project Directors: Jessica De Spain, Melissa Homestead, Emily Rau. “Society for the Study of American Women Writers Recovery Hub.” NEH, Digital Humanities Advancement Grant, Level 1.
  • 2020: Glasscock Internal Faculty Residential Fellowship. Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research. Texas A&M University. Teaching Leave Fall 2020.
  • 2019: Arts & Humanities Fellow. Division of Research. Texas A&M University. ($15,000)
  • 2018: Consultant and participant. PI: Maryemma Graham. “Black Book Interactive Project—Extending the Reach (BBIP-ER).” The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Extension Grant
  • 2016: Consultant and participant. PI: Maryemma Graham. “Black Book Interactive Project.” NEH Start-Up Grant, Level 1.
  • 2015: Amy Earhart, Maura Ives, Sarah Potvin, and Rebecca Hankins. “Creating Next Generation Cultural Data: The Digital Black Bibliographic Project (DiBB).” Program to Enhance Scholarly and Creative Activities.  Texas A&M University.
  • 2013: Young Scholars Award, VolkswagenStiftung. “(Digital) Humanities Revisited: Challenges and Opportunities in the Digital Age.” Herrenhausen Palace, Hannover, Germany.
  • 2010-12: Participant and primary workshop leader.  Andrew Stauffer, PI.  NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship) Summer Workshops:  Emerging Issues in Digital Scholarship.  Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities. NEH. ($193,963 total; approximately $4,000 for Earhart)
  • 2009: “The Center for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture,” with Maura Ives, Patrick Burkhart, Margaret Ezell, James Harner, et al.  The White Paper Research Roadmap Competition, Texas A&M University. (approximately $2,500,000 over 5 years)
  • 2007: NEH Summer Stipend. Reports of the Selectmen and Other Officers of the Town of Concord (1841-1865).   The 19th-Century Concord Digital Archive.  National Endowment for the Humanities.  ($5,000)
  • 2017: University Distinguished Achievement Award, Teaching. The Association of Former Students and Texas A&M University.
  • 2015: Amy Earhart and Shweta Kailani. Exemplary Course Repository Award. Teaching with Technology Conference. Texas A&M University.
  • 2013-14: Montague-CTE Scholar Teaching Award. College of Liberal Arts, Texas A&M University.

Selected Publications

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    “Digital Literary Redlining: African American Anthologies, Digital Humanities, and the Canon.” Book Manuscript. In production as of September 1, 2024 and under contract with Stanford University Press.

     

              Earhart, Amy E.  Traces of the Old, Uses of the New:  The Emergence of the Digital Literary  Studies;

    Traces of the Old Uses of the New - Earhart

      University of Michigan Press, 2015.

    Traces of the Old, Uses of the New focuses on twenty-five years of developments, including digital editions, digital archives, e-texts, text mining, and visualization, to situate emergent products and processes in relation to historical trends of disciplinary interest in literary study. By reexamining the roil of theoretical debates and applied practices from the last generation of work in juxtaposition with applied digital work of the same period, Earhart also seeks to expose limitations in need of alternative methods. 

    The American Literature Scholar in the Digital Age - Earhart

    Earhart, Amy E.  The American Literature Scholar in the Digital Age.  University of Michigan Press, 2010.

    The American Literature Scholar in the Digital Age, which features a wide range of practitioner-scholars, is the first of its kind: a gathering of people who are expert in American literary studies and in digital technologies, scholars uniquely able to draw from experience with building digital resources and to provide theoretical commentary on how the transformation to new technologies alters the way we think about and articulate scholarship in American literature.


    Other Publications

    • “Active Learning and Hard Histories:  Using Open Access Digital Archives to Teach Undergraduate Research Skills.” Creativity in the Classroom. Ed. Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick, Michael Morrone, and Deborah Whaley. Indiana UP. In production.
    • “Feminist Digital Humanities.” The Bloomsbury Handbook to the Digital Humanities. Ed. James O’Sullivan. New York: Bloomsbury Academic Press. 73-80. 2022. Invited.
    • “An Editorial Turn: Reviving Print and Digital Editing of Black-Authored Literary Texts.” The Digital black Atlantic. Debates in Digital Humanities Series. Ed. Roopika Risam and Kelly Baker Josephs. Minneapolis, U Minnesota P, 2021. 69-95. Invited.
    • With Roopika Risam and Matthew Bruno. “Citational Politics: Quantifying the Influence of Gender on Citation in Digital Scholarship in the Humanities.” DSH: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities.
    • “Digital Humanities within a Global Context: Creating Borderlands of Localized Expression.” Fudan Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences. 5.17. 1-13. 2018.
    • “Can we Trust the University?: Digital Humanities Collaborations with Historically Exploited Cultural Communities.” Bodies of Information: Intersectional Feminism and Digital Humanities. Ed. Elizabeth Losh and Jacqueline Wernimont. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 2018. 369-390. Invited.
    • “The Tools of Power: Is there an American Literature Digital Pedagogy?” Teaching with Digital Humanities: Tools and Methods for Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Ed. Jennifer Travis and Jessica DeSpain. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2018. 205-14. Invited.
    • “Emerson and the Digital Humanities,” Approaches to Teaching the Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. Mark C. Long and Sean Ross Meehan. MLA Approaches to Teaching series. New York: The Modern Language Association of America. 2018. 164-8. Invited.
    • “Digital Humanities within a Global Context: Creating Borderlands of Localized Expression.” Fudan Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences. 5.17. 1-13. 2018.
    • With Maura Ives. “Race, Print and Digital Humanities: Pedagogical Approaches.” AHA Today: A Blog of the American Historical Association. Invited.
    •  “The Book in the Age of Academic Anxiety.” American Literary History. ajy004, 2018.
    •  With Toniesha Taylor. “Pedagogies of Race: Digital Humanities in the Age of Ferguson.” In Debates in Digital Humanities, 2016. Ed. Lauren Klein and Matthew Gold. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 2016. 251-64. Print and Digital. Refereed.
    • “Digital Humanities Futures: Conflict, Power, and Public Knowledge.” Digital Studies/ Le Champ Numerique. Special issue: Congress 2015. Ed. Jon Saklofske, Susan Brown and Padmini Ray Murray. 2016. Invited.
    •   “The Digital Humanities as a Laboratory.”  In Humanities and the Digital.  Ed. David Theo Goldberg and Patrik Svensson.  Boston: MIT P., 2015. 391-400. Invited. Refereed.
    •  “Alex Haley’s Malcolm X:  ‘The Malcolm X I knew’ and note cards from The Autobiography of Malcolm X.”  Scholarly Editing: The Annual of the Association for Documentary Editing.35 (2014).
    • “’After a hundred years/ Nobody knows the place,–‘: Notes Toward Spatial Visualizations of Emily Dickinson.” Special Issue: Networking Dickinson. The Emily Dickinson Journal. 23.1 (2014): 98-105. Print. Invited. Refereed.
    • “Can Information be Unfettered?:  Race and the new Digital Humanities Canon.”  In Debates in Digital Humanities.  Ed. Matthew Gold.  Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P., 2012.  309-18.  Print. Invited. Refereed. Reprint expanded version, online open access.
    • “The Digital Edition and Digital Humanities.” Textual Cultures: Texts, Context, Interpretation. 7.1 (2012): 18-28.  Print. Invited. Refereed.
    • “Models of Digital Documentation:  The 19th-Century Digital Concord Archive.” Documentary Editing 31 (2010): 35-41.  Print. Invited. Refereed.
    •  “Mapping 19th-Century Concord:  Google Maps and the Concord Archive.” Ed. Amy Earhart and Maura Ives.  Digital Textual Studies:  Past, Present and Future. Spec. issue of  DHQ:  Digital Humanities Quarterly.  3.3. (2009).  n. pg. Web. Abstract and Poster.  Refereed.
    •  “Knit Blogging:  Considering an Online Community.”  Lore:  An E-journal for Teachers of Writing. (2004). n. pg. Web. Refereed.
    •  “Challenging Gaps:  Collaboration across Traditional Boundaries in Digital Research.” In The American Literature Scholar in the Digital Age. Ed. Amy Earhart and Andrew Jewell.  Digital Culture/ Editorial Theory and Literary Criticism Ser. Ann Arbor:  U of Michigan P, 2010.  27-43. Print. Refereed.
    •  “The Electronic Age.”  In The Oxford Handbook to Transcendentalism.  Ed. Joel Myerson, Sandy Petrulionis, and Laura Walls.  Oxford:  Oxford UP, 2010.  682-9.  Print. Invited. Refereed.
    •  “Elizabeth Peabody on ‘the Temperament of the Colored Classes’:  African-Americans, Progressive History, and Education in a Democratic System.” In Reinventing the Peabody Sisters.  Ed. Katharine Rodier, Monika Elbert, and Julie Hall.  Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2006.  77-90. Print. Refereed.
    • “Representative Men, Slave Revolt, and Emerson’s ‘Conversion’ to Abolitionism.”  ATQ:  American Transcendental Quarterly 13.4 (1999): 287-303. Print. Refereed.

    Selected Digital Projects

     

    Editor of Special Issues of Journals

    • DH and American Studies. Ed. Lauren Tilton, Amy Earhart, Matthew Delmont, Susan Garfinkel, Jesse P. Karlsberg, and Angel David Nieves. Spec. issue of American Quarterly. 70.3 (2018).
    • Digital Textual Studies:  Past, Present and Future. Ed. Amy Earhart and Maura Ives.  Spec. issue of  DHQ:  Digital Humanities Quarterly.  3.3 (2009).  n. pg. Web.
Scholars@TAMU Google Scholar Profile