Kenton Rambsy
Experience
Assistant Professor of African American Literature and Digital Humanities
2015 - Present
University of Texas at Arlington
In my research and teaching, I consider how metadata and quantitative data can be used to understand literary history and engage in interdisciplinary research. I collect data related to publishing histories, thematic content, and geography in order to identify and illuminate relationships between various black artists, genres, and historical periods.
Academic Program Committee Chair
2012 - 2014
Association for the Study of African-American Life and History (ASALH)
I served as the Academic Program Coordinator for the 2013 and 2014 ASALH Conventions. These three-day conventions required me to organize and schedule over 700 events, including individual presentations, plenary sessions, and film viewings. I also oversaw the registration of more than 1,300 convention attendees. My expertise in technology, literature, history, African American Studies, and graphic design allowed me to navigate the conference planning software, easily assemble panels based on thematic content, and create souvenir program journals.
Graduate Teaching Assistant
Graduate Teaching Assistant
2011 - 2014
University of Kansas
As a graduate teaching assistant at the University of Kansas, I taught classes that emphasized storytelling techniques across multiple genres—in poems by Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Amiri Baraka; in novels by Toni Morrison and Colson Whitehead; in speeches by Malcolm X and Fannie Lou Hamer; in music by Jay Z, Nas, and Beyonce; and in advertisements by MTV and Nike. My courses encouraged students to consider the power and pervasiveness of narratives.
Project Digital Initiative Coordinator
2010 – 2014
The Project on the History of Black Writing (HBW)
University of Kansas
As the Project Digital Initiative Coordinator for the Project on the HBW, I initiated numerous public digital projects. The “100 Novels Project”— a data collection system that analyzes over six dozen factors related to texts—was one of the most notable. The findings from the “100 Novels Project” provided three mixed media exhibits and eventually led to HBW receiving a $15,000.00 seed grant in 2013. In 2011, I founded the HBW blog in 2011, which filled a notable void by offering consistent posts dedicated to African American novel history. The blog provided an online venue where graduate students could publish alongside accomplished African American literary scholars, such as Jerry Ward, Jr., Frank Dobson, Gregory Rutledge, and Maryemma Graham.
Education
2012 - 2015
UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS
Ph.D. in English
Concentration: African American Literature, Digital Humanities
Honors: Highest Distinction
Dissertation: The Landscapes of African American Short Stories, 1887 - 2014
Description: My project explains how the widespread transmission of short stories by Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Toni Cade Bambara, and others assisted in shaping the contours of African American literature. My project sheds new light on the promise of utilizing text-mining and what I refer to as “literary geo-tagging,” an approach to mapping geographic locations in fiction. Overall, the project accounts for the circulation of African American short stories the field-defining roles of literature anthologies, and the convergence of black literary studies and digital humanities.
2010 - 2012
UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS
Master of Arts in English
Concentration: African American Short Stories
Masters Thesis: The Freedom to Choose: The Aesthetics of Choice in Short Stories by Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Amiri Baraka, and Toni Cade Bambara
My project makes a contribution to literary studies by providing a new point of entry and a site of inquiry into African American literature using quantitative and qualitative methods. I identify the frequency with which certain geographic regions appear across short stories by different authors such as Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Toni Cade Bambara, and Amiri Baraka. Also, I analyze the use of African American Vernacular English used in select stories and how this creates impressions about geographic regions.
2006 - 2010
MOREHOUSE COLLEGE
Bachelor of Arts in English
Honors: Magna Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa
At Morehouse College, I engaged in a series of scholarly projects—both inside and outside of the classroom—that assisted me in developing a knowledge of African American literature and engaging diverse audiences in discussions about black writers. I immersed myself in a range of texts and conversations highlighting race, education, and identity in the writings of such figures as Frederick Douglass and Richard Wright. I received a 2008 UNCF/Mellon-Mays fellowship and 2009 Schomburg-Mellon Humanities Fellow served as vital technological groundwork.
I also served as a research assistant at Vanderbilt University’s Bishop Joseph Johnson Black Cultural Center in Nashville and at Atlanta’s Auburn Avenue Research Library.