work

full curriculum vitae available upon request

teaching

since 2011, jessica has had the distinct pleasure of teaching undergraduate students at the University of Maryland, College Park. Courses taught include: Oral Communication: Principles & Practices; Critical Thinking & Speaking; Communication & Gender; Rhetoric of Black America; and, African American Digital Humanities: Digital Archives. in 2014, both the Department of Communication and the Teaching & Learning Transformation Center (TLTC) recognized her teaching record with their Outstanding Teaching Award and Distinguished Graduate Student Teacher Award, respectively. most recently, she was awarded the 2021 Donna B. Hamilton Teaching Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in the Office of Undergraduate Studies Programs.

as a Postdoctoral Associate and, later, Assistant Director of the first African American History, Culture, & Digital Humanities Initiative (AADHum) team from 2017-2019, jessica also provided mentorship and instruction in digital skills (including critical cartography, network analysis, data modeling, feminist design, and data visualization) to graduate students, faculty, and community activists.

currently, jessica teaches in the Design Cultures & Creativity (DCC) living-learning program, in the Honors College at the University of Maryland, College Park. thus far, she has contributed three original courses to the DCC curriculum: Critical Data Modeling, Legacies of Black Creatives, and GamePlay and Game Mechanics. While serving as the program’s interim director in 2022-2023, she also taught DCC’s first-year large lecture, Introduction to Design Cultures & Creativity.

since 2022, she has also taught Digital Humanities in the Services of Public Humanities in the Master’s in Engaged & Public Humanities program at Georgetown University; and Using Social + Digital Media in the Master of Arts in Communication program at Johns Hopkins University.

in addition to elaborating on the productive convergence of African American history, culture, and digital humanities, she specializes in critical text encoding for historical documents and Black digital work. she has taught these practices and principles at:

research

jessica produces scholarly research that engages several fields, particularly Communication, African American Studies, Black Studies, History, Information Science, and digital humanities. her work has been accepted for presentation at international, national, and regional conferences, including those held by the National Humanities Alliance, KeystoneDH, Association of Internet Researchers, Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Consortium, American Studies Association, International Communication Association, National Communication Association, Eastern Communication Association, Southern States Communication Association, and Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association. 

she has also appeared for invited talks at the Project STAND Symposium (Chicago State University, 2019) and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) Digital Dialogues series (College Park, MD, 2019).

jessica has furthered her research agenda by attending several esteemed seminars and institutes, including Humanities Intensive Learning & Teaching (HILT), the Rhetoric Society of America Summer Institute, and National Communication Association's Doctoral Honors Seminar. 

you can read some of jessica's most recent work in Rhetoric and Public Affairs and Information, Communication & Society.

in collaboration with her colleagues, Dr. Catherine Knight Steele and Dr. Kevin Winstead, she also co-authored Doing Black Digital Humanities with Radical Intentionality, published in 2023.

service

culminating in December 2021, jessica completed a two-year term as an elected member of the TEI Technical Council.

additionally, as an early-career scholar, jessica has dedicated her service to several academic associations. she has served as a reviewer for the American Studies, Political Communication, and Public Address divisions of the National Communication Association, as well as for the Voices of Diversity division of the Eastern Communication Association. 

as a graduate student in the Department of Communication, jessica served the Association of Communication Graduate Students (COMMGrads) in a variety of positions, including Vice President and Representative to the Departmental Assembly; was a founding member and general administrator of the Recovering Democracy Archives project; and served as the graduate student representative to a 2015-2016 search committee for T/T faculty in Rhetoric & Political Culture.

elsewhere at the University of Maryland, she founded and led an ambassador program for Accessibility and Disability Services (ADS). by visiting and speaking at departments' onboarding/welcome orientations across campus, she has worked to improve teaching assistants' and faculty's support for students with documented and undocumented disabilities, especially anxiety, depression, autism spectrum disorders, and extreme life hardship (including food, shelter, and healthcare insecurity).