Daniel Kurt Ackermann is Interim Chief Curator and Director of Collections at Old Salem Museums & Gardens and the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts (MESDA). He also directs The MESDA Summer Institute, a graduate-level program partnership between the museum and the University of Virginia. Daniel has curated a wide range of exhibits at the museum including “Black and White all Mix’d Together”: The Hidden Legacy of Enslaved Craftsmen. Daniel began his career at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York where he was the Tiffany & Co. Foundation Curatorial Intern in American Decorative Arts. He holds a degrees from the College of William and Mary, the University of Virginia, and a PhD in art history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Gary Albert is the Director of Research for the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts (MESDA) at Old Salem Museums & Gardens in Winston-Salem. He oversees the museum’s research initiatives and facilities, including the Anne P. and Thomas A. Gray Library. Gary led a ten-year initiative to digitize the museum’s research and collections assets and now uses those tools to tell digital stories in our increasingly online world. He is also Editor of the museum’s scholarly journal and the 2019-2020 President of the Consortium of Online Decorative Arts, a collective of international museums and archives committed to providing and producing material culture research digitally.
Lisa Blee is associate professor of history at Wake Forest University, where she teaches courses in Public History, research methods, and U.S. History. She is also the coordinator for Cultural Heritage and Preservation Studies program and directs internships, individual student research, and course projects in partnership with local museums and institutions.
Brianna Derr is the Manager of Advanced Learning Projects under Academic Technology, a division of Information Systems at Wake Forest University. Her position aims to enhance teaching and learning in the curriculum through the use of digital technologies.
Meredith Farmer (meredithfarmer.org) is an Assistant Teaching Professor of Core Literature and part of the planning committee for the new Department of Environment and Sustainability. As a teacher and scholar her focus is on the nineteenth-century in America and the ways it shaped the present moment. Most of her published work is on Herman Melville, but her current research and teaching interests include the history of slavery in our community here in Winston-Salem and the ways that rhetoric about the environment back in the nineteenth century contributed to our current climate crisis.
Sarah Ketchley is an Egyptologist and art history scholar in the Department of Near Eastern Languages & Civilization at the University of Washington, where she teaches introductory and graduate-level classes in digital humanities. She is also an Adjunct Associate Professor in the School of Humanities and Philosophy at the University of Maryland Global Campus. She is co-director of Newbook Digital Texts, a digital humanities publishing house offering students from all disciplines at the UW the unique opportunity to transcribe and encode unpublished primary source material from the Near East. ketchley@uw.edu | @SarahKetchley
Anna Lacy is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of Delaware. Her dissertation explores household accidents in the nineteenth century and changing ideas about safety and danger in the home. She is Project Coordinator for the Colored Conventions Project and the co-chair of the Digital Archives and National Teaching Partners Committee.
Brandi Locke is a PhD student at the University of Delaware. Her work focuses on nineteenth-century African American women’s activist literature and history. She is co-chair of the Digital Archives and National Teaching Partners Committee of the Colored Conventions Project.
Alanna Meltzer-Holderfield is Operations and Program Manager at MUSE Winston-Salem, where she has worked since 2014. In this role she leads the museum’s oral history initiative, curates community programs, works on marketing/communications, development, supervises interns, and more. She also serves on the Forsyth County Historic Resources Commission.
Jessica Richard is Associate Professor and Chair of English at Wake Forest University. She has published on gambling in eighteenth-century British culture, Jane Austen, Samuel Johnson, and polar exploration. Her current book project is on forms of knowledge in Jane Austen. She is the founder and co-editor of the inter-institutional digital humanities projects, The 18th-Century Common and The Maria Edgeworth Letters.
Shelley Sizemore serves as Director of Community Partnerships in the Office of Civic & Community Engagement. In this role, she builds relationships with community partners, connects faculty, staff, and students to community based work, and works to measure the impact of partnerships between WFU and the community. She directs the ACE (Academic and Community Engagement) Fellows program for faculty interested in community-based teaching and research, the Summer Nonprofit Immersion Program (SNIP), and Dash Corps, a project-based learning program.
Mir Yarfitz is Asssociate Professor of History and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Wake Forest University. His teaching and research interests include US-Latin American relations, cultural production, social movements, dictatorship and resistance, racial hierarchies, migration, gender, sexuality, masculinity, and transgender studies. His 2019 Rutgers University Press book Impure Migrations: Jews and Sex Work in Golden Age Argentina, historicizes immigrant Ashkenazi Jews in organized prostitution in Buenos Aires between the 1890s and 1930s and in broader transnational flows of sex workers and moral opposition.
Tanya Zanish-Belcher is currently the Director of Special Collections & Archives (SCA), and University Archivist (2013-) for Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. She was named an Society of American Archivists Fellow in 2011 and served as SAA’s 73rd President (2017-2018). She oversees SCA, a Team of 9 FT archivists and librarians, in addition to student employees, interns, and volunteers. Over the past several years, Special Collections & Archives (SCA) Team, working with students and faculty, has made a significant effort to better integrate the use of primary sources and other special collections across the Wake Forest curriculum. SCA’s unique resources—including digital collections numbering over 58,000 items organized in over 60 collections—are available for consultation 24/7.