PhD Student's Prize-Winning Digital Humanities Project in the News

English PhD student Will Fenton was recently featured in the Philadelphia Inquirer for his Digital Humanities project, Digital Paxton. The op-ed, which draws parallels between the 1764 pamphlet war and contemporary media and politics, highlights Will’s digital archive and critical edition of the pamphlet war. Here's an excerpt from the story:

A Ph.D. candidate in English, Fenton worked over the past year to create the Digital Paxton project (digitalpaxton.org), a free resource featuring dozens of the pamphlets and cartoons, as well as accompanying essays and transcriptions.

For him, the contemporary parallels are clear.

"The term elite, weaponized in the 2016 election, figured heavily in the Paxton debate," said Fenton, while "many pamphleteers stoked debate anonymously, in much the same way that provocateurs hide behind Twitter handles."

"In the context of the Brexit vote and the rise of right-wing nationalist movements across the West, [we] would do well to study this incident and to critically engage pamphleteers' zero-sum views of race, class, and cosmopolitanism," he said.

 

Fenton’s project also recently won first prize in the NYCDH Graduate Student Digital Project Awards, for which he’ll be giving a talk at NYCDH Week.

Click here to read the complete article.