Jim McGrath, PhD

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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/his pronouns), and I’m currently an Instructional Designer at Salem State University. I’m interested in digital humanities, digital archives, digital pedagogy, public history, public humanities, hyperlocal histories, new media, materiality and popular culture, and comic books. Check out the rest of my site to learn about the digital projects I’ve worked on and the classes I’ve taught at Brown University, Northeastern University, Arizona State University (ASU Online) and elsewhere.

If you’re interested in higher ed, you may want to check out my newsletter, University of Hard Knocks. You can either subscribe to receive the newsletter in your inbox or just read the posts online like it’s a blog (which it basically is). Opinions expressed in the newsletter do not necessarily reflect the sentiments of my employer.

I am pretty easy to find on Twitter (@JimMc_Grath) and less frequently on Mastodon. You can also email me at jimmcgrath.us@gmail.com. I’m currently available to consult on projects similar to the ones outlined on this site’s Projects page: please be in touch if you’re interested! I’m also happy to discuss my research, digital humanities, digital archives, public humanities, and digital public humanities (among other topics) in your classroom or at your university, schedule and resources permitting! Feel free to check out my CV to learn more about my work!

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.

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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