Jim McGrath, PhD

Hope everyone’s having a good day.

Photo of Jim McGrath introducing students to the Our Marathon website in Snell Library (Northeastern University), Fall 2013

Hi. My name is Jim McGrath (he/him pronouns), and I’m currently an Instructional Designer at Salem State University. I’m interested in digital pedagogy, historiography (particularly digital approaches to history as well as public humanities / public history, digital and otherwise), Check out the rest of my site to learn about the digital projects I’ve worked on. You can also learn more about some of the classes I’ve taught at places like Salem State, Brown University, Northeastern University, Arizona State University (ASU Online), RISD and elsewhere.

You can email me at jimmcgrath.us@gmail.com. I am also on Bluesky and LinkedIn. If it’s a good fit I am happy to discuss my research interests, projects and publications, and my work as an instructional designer at your conference, classroom, or university (I guess elsewhere too!), schedule and resources permitting.

I have a doctorate in English from Northeastern University. My dissertation, “Borrowed Country: Digital Media, Remediation, and North American Poetry in the Twenty-First Century,” examines the social dimensions of reading, writing, and publishing poetry in digital contexts (ebooks, Wikipedia articles, social media networks like Twitter) in the twenty-first century. Poets surveyed in the dissertation include John Ashbery, Anne Carson, Kevin Young, Steve Roggenbuck, and Patricia Lockwood. My dissertation can be read and downloaded for free via Northeastern’s Digital Repository Service.

At Northeastern I was also Project Co-Director (with Alicia Peaker) of Our Marathon: The Boston Bombing Digital Archive, an award-winning digital public humanities initiative.

Opinions expressed on this website do not necessarily reflect the sentiments of my employer or my colleagues or my family or pretty much anyone besides me. I do mainly use this site as a professional online presence for networking and all that. If we are friends in real life and you don’t care about my day job (understandable) and you just came across this website after Googling me for whatever reason, I am sorry to disappoint you. Let’s hang out soon though.

Select Publications

Teaching Public History book cover
Teaching Public History (UNC Press, 2023)

“Digital Restorative Justice in the Public History Classroom: Data Literacy and Archival Literacy in Mapping Violence.” Teaching Public History. Eds. Julia Brock and Evan Faulkenbury. UNC Press, 2023.

cover to Doing Public Humanities (Routledge, 2020)
Doing Public Humanities (Routledge, 2020)

“Teaching Digital Public Humanities With The Public Library.” Doing Public Humanities. Ed. Susan Smulyan. Routledge. 2020.

“Museums and Social Media during COVID-19.” The Public Historian 42.4 (November 2020). Preprint available via Brown’s Digital Repository.

“Review: My Nola, My Story.” Reviews in Digital Humanities. 1(1). January 2020.

“Breaking Bandersnatch: Using Twine to Teach Digital Project Development.” November 2019. Editors’ Choice, Digital Humanities Now.

“Podcasts and Public History.” History@Work. National Council on Public History. September 11, 2019.

Postdoctoral Laborers Bill of Rights. Co-authored with Hannah Alpert-Abrams, Heather Froehlich, Amanda Henrichs, and Kim Martin. April 2019.

“Stories of The City: Newark, Newest Americans, and Hyperlocal Forms of Digital Public Humanities.” American Quarterly. 71.1. March 2019. 301-07

“Mapping Violence: A Case Study on Digital Project Development, Iterative Approaches to Data Collection and Visualization, and Collaborative Work with Undergraduates.” Design For Diversity Learning Toolkit. February 2019.

“Memes.” SAGE Handbook of Web History. Eds. Niels Brügger and Ian Millgan. 2018

“‘This is Fine’: Reading, Making, and Archiving Memes After November 2016.” October 2018. Editors’ Choice, Digital Humanities Now.

“Hyperlocal Histories and Digital Collections” October 2018. Editors’ Choice, Digital Humanities Now.

“Precarious Labor and the Digital Humanities.” With Christina Boyles, Anne Cong-Huyen, Carrie Johnston, and Amanda Phillips. American Quarterly. 70.3. September 2018. 693-700.

“The Tour as Technology: Digital Approaches to Location-Based Storytelling.” Preservation Education and Research. Volume 10. 2018. 121-23 (PDF).

“Our Marathon, five years later: reflections on the work of digital public humanities.” History@Work. National Council on Public History. April 30, 2018.

“Our Marathon: The Role of Graduate Student and Library Labor in Making the Boston Bombing Digital Archive.” With Alicia Peaker. In Digital Humanities, Libraries, and Partnerships: A Critical Examination of Labor, Networks, and Community. Eds. Robin Kear and Kate Joranson. Chandos Publishing. 2018.

“Reappearing Acts.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 11.3. 2017.

“Days of Future Past: Augmented Reality and Temporality in Digital Public Humanities.” 2017. Editors’ Choice, Digital Humanities Now.

Questions, comments? Feel free to email me at jimmcgrath.us@gmail.com or get in touch with me on Twitter @JimMc_Grath.

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