Advancing HBCU Scholarship, Diversifying Digital Publishing

Advancing HBCU Scholarship, Diversifying Digital Publishing

Sara Jo Cohen, Editorial Director, University of Michigan Press Clare Jones, Assistant Editor, Brown University Digital Publications Diona E. Layden, Special Collections Librarian, Fisk University La Tanya L. Reese Rogers, Associate Professor of Literature and Drama, Fisk University

Publishing entities across humanities centers, libraries, and university presses are experimenting with new scholarly forms and collaborations that bring together diverse expertise to support open and innovative humanistic scholarship. This session offers a case study of a community-based collaboration focused on experimentation with new forms in the digital publishing environment. “Advancing HBCU Scholarship, Diversifying Digital Publishing” is a collaboration among the HBCU Library Alliance, Brown University Digital Publications (BUDP), and the University of Michigan Press (UMP) to build capacity for developing enhanced digital monographs. Librarians at three HBCUs, mentored by BUDP and UMP, will obtain the necessary skill set to support a member of their faculty in authoring a born-digital publication. The resulting works will be published via an open access publishing model that disseminates the digital publications to the broadest possible audience for the greatest possible impact. The participants will discuss this collaboration’s impact on diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility efforts within the digital publishing landscape, as well as their approach to collaboration and knowledge sharing.

Sara Jo Cohen is Editorial Director at University of Michigan Press, where she handles acquisitions in theater and performance studies, music, dance, and American studies.

Clare Jones is Assistant Editor for Brown University Digital Publications.

Diona E. Layden is the Special Collections Librarian at Fisk University. She is an Alumna of Spelman College and The University of Tennessee, Knoxville and has worked in Special Collections since 2022.

La Tanya L. Reese Rogers is an Associate Professor of Literature and Drama, and director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Honors Program at Fisk University. She holds a doctorate degree in literature and drama from Howard University and two bachelor’s degrees from Washington University in St. Louis, where she held a Mellon Mays Fellowship. Dr. Rogers is a co-founder of the Edward Alexander Bouchét National Graduate Honor Society, which has chapters at Yale, Stanford, and other prominent universities across the nation. She has published on subjects ranging from contemporary playwrights in the United States to economic racism in Brazil. Her most recent article appears in the Black Theatre Review. She is currently participating in the Mellon-funded Afro PWW2 Program.