Project Staff

Professor Nicole N. Aljoe

Director

Professor Aljoe’s research focuses on 18th and early 19th Century Black Atlantic and Caribbean literatures with a specialization on the slave narrative and early novels. In addition to teaching in these areas, she has published essays and book chapters on these topics as digital explorations of the myriad ways in which the voices of subalterns have appeared in the archives.

Savita Maharaj

Project Manager

Savita Maharaj is an undergraduate senior at Northeastern University majoring in English and minoring in Africana and Writing Studies. She is interested in Caribbean literature, postcolonial theory, and archival theory and works as an undergraduate research assistant for the Early Caribbean Digital Almanac.

Yana Mommadova

Graduate Research Fellow

Yana joined Northeastern’s Sociology Department in the fall of 2019. She is originally from Central Asia and completed her undergraduate degrees in Economics and Political Science at the American University in Bulgaria. Currently, she is studying right wing populist movements in Western democracies.

Serena Turner

Undergraduate Research Fellow

Serena Turner is currently an undergraduate junior at Northeastern University. She is studying to get her Bachelor's of Art in Communications with a minor in Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies. She is very passionate about Black Feminist studies and how the intersection of race and gender shape Black women's experiences. She is a recent addition to the team and couldn't be more excited about making more Black stories visible!

Juniper Johnson

Graduate Research Fellow

Juniper is an English PhD Student at Northeastern University studying classifications of gender, authority, and disability in nineteenth century domestic medical texts in the United States. Their research explores the history of a/sexuality in women’s professional and popular medical and scientific texts using genealogy, computational text analysis, and critical bibliography. While at Northeastern, Juniper has served as a research assistant for digital projects including: the Early Caribbean Digital Archive (ECDA), the Homosaurus (a LGBTQ+ linked vocabulary), the Women Writers Project, the Early Black Boston Digital Almanac (EBBDA), Mapping Black London (MBL), and the Primary Source Cooperative (with the Massachusetts's Historical Society). They have served as the Coordinator for the NULab for Maps, Texts, and Networks, and have also developed and led workshops with faculty partners on digital proficiencies for the Digital Integration Teaching Initiative.

Project Alumni

Alanna Prince

Content Management

Alanna Prince is a Ph.D. Candidate in the English Department at Northeastern University. Her work focuses on contemporary poetry, visual culture, the historical resonance of transatlantic slavery, and Black feminist theory— specifically looking into how creatives, particularly women poets, are using archival documents to retell or reimagine history from a decolonial, womanist, and anti-racist perspective. She is also invested in the digital humanities, working particularly with archives and other digital repositories to ensure that they are designed to be accessible and helpful to all people. She currently serves as the Exhibit Curator and Acquisitions Lead at the Early Caribbean Digital Archive, and as an Editor for Insurrect!, an online magazine for radical thinking in Early American studies. She is currently “Luminous Black: On Making Time, the World, and the Self in Black Women’s Poetry.”

Tanvi Modi

Graduate Research Assistant – Designer & Developer

Tanvi is a graduate student of Information Design and Data Visualization in the College of Arts, Media and Design at Northeastern University. She worked on rebranding the website with an overall visual design system. She focuses on designing & developing exhibits and navigation pages on the backend using WordPress.

Guanying Qu

Graduate Research Fellow

Guanying Qu is a graduate student in the Khoury College of Computer Science at Northeastern University. She joined the team in Fall 2021 as a graduate research fellow. Guanying mainly focuses on building and maintaining exhibits and navigation pages and tools for user interactions.

Rhya Moffitt Brooke

Graduate Research Fellow

Rhya Moffitt Brooke is a Ph.D. student in the Department of English at the University of Chicago. She holds a Master’s degree in English from Northeastern University and the University of Texas at Austin. Her work focuses on the intersections of Blackness, gender, and (dis)ability/(un)wellness.

Tieanna Graphenreed

Graduate Research Fellow

Tieanna Graphenreed is an English PhD student at Northeastern University studying rhetorics of Black citizenship and Black spatial politics. Tieanna’s research explores questions of rhetorical citizenship through lenses of writing studies and civic rhetorical education, critical geographies of race and space, and digital humanities. Tieanna Grapheneed is Managing Editor for Reviews in Digital Humanities. While at Northeastern, Tieanna has worked on digital projects with the Early Caribbean Digital Archive (ECDA), Early Black Boston Digital Almanac (EBBDA), and Mapping Black London (MBL); she has also served as Assistant Director of the Writing Center, and developed and led workshops on various digital tools with the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks and the Digital Integration Teaching Initiative..