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Future Bear, A Hybrid Graphic Space:
Thematic Explorations of Digital History Practice

Julian Chambliss
2 PM–3:30, February 23, 2017
Smathers Library 100
University of Florida

 

This talk will explore the intersection of digital practice and history in order to discuss how collecting, preserving, and presenting history within the broad landscape of digital humanities can be used to enhance teaching, service, and scholarship. Deeply informed by the ideas of critical making and generative scholarship, the talk will explore the differing mode of engagement linked to the integration of digital tools and techniques in and out of the classroom. From interdisciplinary projects that blend curatorial and research practice to immersive evolving classroom based projects, the opportunity for the modern humanities scholar to teach, learning, and engage across platforms offers unique opportunities and challenges.

Chambliss’ Future Bear project (http://futurebear.strikingly.com/) is a hybrid fine art/comic that uses our historical knowledge of the past to visually explore an uncertain future. The heroine is a polar bear from the not-so-distant future who uses her special abilities to reach out to present-day humans to mitigate the negative effects of climate change. As a socially engaged art project started by Chambliss and artist Rachel Simmons, Future Bear involves the community as participants and co-creators.

About Julian Chambliss

Dr. Chambliss is Professor of History at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, and scholar of the real and imagined city.  He teaches courses in urban history, African-American history, and comic book history in the United States. As a teacher-scholar concerned with community and identity, he has designed numerous public digital history projects that trace community development, document diverse experience, and explore the cultural complexity in Central Florida. He is member of the executive committee of the Florida Digital Humanities Consortium. He is co-recipient of an Associated Colleges of the South (ACS) & Research 1 University Mellon Foundation Collaborative Project grant to explore the creation of digital collaborative ventures to enhance undergraduate engagement with diaspora topics and texts, co-recipient of an ACS Mellon Foundation Faculty Renewal Grant for Project Mosaic: Zora Neale Hurston: A Multidisciplinary Exploration of African-American Culture, a digital project exploring African-American experience. He has been recognized for his community engagement work with a Cornell Distinguished Service Award (2014–2015) and Florida Campus Compact Service Learning Faculty Award (2011).  Dr. Chambliss serves as coordinator of the Africa and African-American Studies Program at Rollins, and Coordinator of the Media, Arts, and Culture Special Interest Section for the Florida Conference of Historians. His WWW site is: http://www.julianchambliss.com/

For additional information please contact Laurie Taylor (laurien@ufl.edu).

This event is co-sponsored by the George A. Smathers Libraries, LibraryPress@UF, the Science Fiction Working Group, and Imagining Climate Change. All ICC events are free and open to the public. No advance registration is required.