Bertram Named Digital Scholarship Incubator Fellow

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April 27, 2017

Erin Bertram, PhD student in English with a WGS specialization, has been named a University Libraries' 2017 Digital Scholarship Incubator Fellow. The other fellows include Grace Brown, Linda Garcia Merchant, and Alexis Swendener.

The Digital Scholarship Incubator is a competitive fellowship program that promotes student-led digital research and scholarship over 12 weeks each summer. During the fellowship period, students commit to developing a contribution to humanities, social science, or related scholarship that depends on digital methodologies for research and/or dissemination.

While concentrating on their own work, DSI Fellows also support the research of the other Incubator Fellows through conversation, critical engagement, and knowledge exchange. Fellows must be willing to actively engage with others working in different disciplinary areas and fields and with a range of methodologies. Fellows receive a stipend to support them in their research, one-on-one and group consultations with a range of Nebraska faculty and staff in the Libraries and beyond, co-working space, and other professional development opportunities.

Bertram is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing, specializing in Women's and Gender Studies. The recipient of Karen Dunning Creative Activity Awards in 2016 and 2017, they are the author of twelve chapbooks of poetry and hybrid texts, including the forthcoming Relief Map, a winner of C&R Press's 2016 Summer Tide Pool Chapbook Competition. They are particularly interested in "gray areas" surrounding both gender and genre.

As an Incubator Fellow, Erin will research and create a digital extension to their creative dissertation, a hybrid genre memoir that explores how their mother's experience with breast cancer and their own non-binary gender identity call into question, in their own unique and sometimes overlapping ways, what it means to be, or not to be, a woman.

Erin's goal is to amplify readers' experience of their writing, via digital means, beyond the delineation that front and back book covers allow, ultimately nuancing understandings of illness, queerness, identity, privilege/marginalization, empathy, and gender.

You can read more about the fellows here.