Who We Are

Professor Nicole Aljoe

Co-Director

Professor Nicole N. Aljoe is an associate professor of English and African American Studies. Her fields of specialization are eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Black Atlantic Literature, the Slave Narrative, Postcolonial Studies, and eighteenth-century British Novel. Professor Aljoe’s recent publications include “Caribbean Slave Narratives” in The Oxford Handbook of African American Slave Narratives. She is co-editor of Journeys of the Slave Narrative in the Early Americas, University of Virginia Press, 2014 and co-editor of Islands in the Stream: The Early Caribbean in Literary History (forthcoming Palgrave MacMillan). She is also the author of Creole TestimoniesSlave Narratives from the British West Indies, 1709-1838 (Palgrave McMillian, 2004).

She co-founded the Early Caribbean Digital Archive with Elizabeth Maddock Dillon in 2011, after realizing there was a dire need to have open-access to well-curated early Caribbean material available online. Since then, she has worked to advance the ECDA by establishing partnerships with Caribbean institutions, creating important pedagogical material for all student levels, uncovering embedded slave narratives, and theorizing how to bring forth the voices of women and people of color from the archive.

Professor Elizabeth Maddock Dillon

Co-Director

Elizabeth Maddock Dillon is Professor and Chair of the Department of English and Co-director of the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks at Northeastern University. She teaches courses in the fields of early American literature, Atlantic theatre and performance, and transatlantic print culture. She is the author of New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1649-1849 (Duke University Press, 2014) The Gender of Freedom: Fictions of Liberalism and the Literary Public Sphere (Stanford University Press, 2004). She is co-editor with Michael Drexler of The Haitian Revolution and the Early U.S.: Histories, Geographies, Textualities, which is forthcoming from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Along with Nicole Aljoe, she co-founded the Early Caribbean Digital Archive in 2011, after realizing there was a dire need to have open-access to well-curated early Caribbean material available online. Since then, she has worked to push the ECDA forward, which includes grant writing, creating partnerships (especially with Caribbean researchers and institutions), and theorizing new and exciting ways to decolonize the archive.

Alanna Prince

Acquisitions and Metadata Lead

Prince is a graduate student in the English Department at Northeastern University. Prince has been working with the ECDA since Fall of 2017,  first as a Research and Metadata Lead then as the Project Manager. She currently focuses on exhibit building, ingesting new materials, and developing metadata.

Avery Blankenship

Project Manager

Blankenship is a graduate student in the English Department at Northeastern University. Blankenship has been working with the ECDA since Spring of 2019 as an Application Developer and now acts as Project Manager. Her work focuses on building and maintaining web-based user interfaces and tools that bring the work of the ECDA to the general public.

Julianna Wessels

Digital Humanities Coordinator

Julianna Wessels is a doctoral student in English at Northeastern. She has been a member of the ECDA since Fall of 2020 and acts as Digital Humanities Coordinator. She focuses on pedagogy, data mining, and representing ECDA geographical material on historical maps.

Savita Maharaj

Undergraduate Research Fellow

Savita Maharaj is an undergraduate student pursuing a combined degree in English and Cultural Anthropology at Northeastern University. She has an immense interest in the ECDA because of her familial relationship to Trinidad and Tobago and her goal of becoming a highschool teacher in the future. Savita’s work with the ECDA focuses on pedagogy and building an exhibit on the history of rebellion and Carnival in Trinidad and Tobago.

Emma Isaacs

Undergraduate Research Fellow

Emma is an undergraduate student at Northeastern University. She joined the team in Fall 2019 as an undergraduate research fellow. Her work focuses on exhibit building and the interconnection between resistance and performance in the early Caribbean.

Natalie Hackman

Undergraduate Research Fellow

Natalie is a Bachelor of Science candidate in Behavioral Neuroscience at Northeastern University. She joined the team in Fall 2019 as an undergraduate research fellow. Her work focuses on exhibit building and medical history in the early Caribbean.

Hannah Kim

Undergraduate Research Fellow

Hannah is a Bachelor of Science candidate in Bioengineering at Northeastern. Hannah joined the team in Fall of 2020 as an undergraduate research fellow. Her work focuses on developing workflows for identifying and curating embedded slave narratives.

Ben Doyle

Project Manager and Web Developer

Elizabeth Hopwood

Project Manager and TEI Director

Dania Dwyer

Research and Pedagogy Lead

Nicole Keller

Acquisitions Manager

Sarah Payne

Research and Pedagogy Lead

Elizabeth Polcha

Project Manager

Lara Rose

NULab Fellow

David Medina

Research and Translation Assistant

Juniper Johnson

Research and Metadata Lead

Dannie Brice

Undergraduate Research Fellow

Tieanna Graphenreed

Pedagogy Lead

Megan Barney

Site Design Lead

This project was created on a customized WordPress instance using the CERES: Exhibit Toolkit. These tools, as well as archival, hosting, and support systems, are provided by the Northeastern University Library Digital Scholarship group. The DSG specializes in the Digital Humanities and helps faculty, staff, and students in the Northeastern community showcase their projects to the public.