Elizabeth (Liz) Rodrigues

Liz Rodrigues is Associate Professor, Humanities and Digital Scholarship Librarian. Liz’s research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of critical digital studies, digital humanities practice, and twentieth-century multiethnic U.S. literatures. Her book, Collecting Lives: Critical Data Narrative as Modernist Aesthetic in Early Twentieth-Century U.S. Literatures contextualizes the application of data collection to human selfhood in order to uncover a modernist aesthetic of data that offers an alternative to the algorithmic logic pervading our contemporary sense of data's revelatory potential. Examining the work of W. E. B. Du Bois, Henry Adams, Gertrude Stein, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Rodrigues asks how each of these authors draw from their work in sociology, history, psychology, and journalism to formulate a critical data aesthetic as they attempt to answer questions of identity around race, gender, and nation both in their research and their life writing. These data-driven modernists not only tell different life stories with data, they tell life stories differently because of data. 

Liz co-leads the Vivero Digital Fellows program and is associated with the Digital Studies Concentration. In the area of digital humanities practice, she has published on metadata creation for digital projects and ethical practices for faculty/student digital project collaboration. She has presented at the Digital Library Federation Forum, Bucknell Digital Scholarship Conference, and Digital Humanities 2022. She currently co-chairs the Modern Language Association Committee on Scholarly Editions, with a focus on digital critical editions.

She attended Kenyon College, where she majored in English and minored in Greek. She received her MLIS from the University of South Florida and MFA in poetry from Florida Atlantic University on an Institution for Museum and Library Services-funded fellowship. She worked at Grinnell College in a term position 2008-2009. After receiving a PhD in English Language and Literature with a certification in African American and Diaspora Studies at University of Michigan in 2015, she was a Council on Library and Information Resources Postdoctoral Fellow at Temple University 2015-2016 and returned to Grinnell College in 2016. She was a Harris Faculty Fellow 2019-2020. 

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