IATH NEWS

2026-2027 IATH Fellows Announced

September 1, 2026

IATH is pleased to announce its 2026-2027 Resident and Associate Fellows. IATH Fellows work closely with IATH staff to design and implement research projects that use digital tools and methodology to develop and publish their scholarship.

Tessa Farmer, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Global Studies, has been awarded the Resident Fellowship for her project, “Digital Sabils: Vernacular Water Infrastructures, Ethical Futures, and Climate Adaptation.” Prof. Farmer is looking at the role of individual privately owned water fountains provided for public use in Cairo, Egypt. Sabils, which range from simple earthenware jars to mechanized water coolers, are part of the social and ethical fabric of Cairo, operating within Islamic traditions of charitable acts. Her research centers on the question of how this well-established informal water supply system reflects and responds to inadequate public infrastructures and increasing climate instability. Prof. Farmer first partnered with IATH in 2024 receiving an IATH Development Fellowship, which supported emerging digital humanities research efforts. Since then, she has worked with digital humanities experts and subject specialists at IATH and the UVA Library to plan and begin developing her project.

This year, an Associate Fellowship was awarded to Ashleigh Wade, Associate Professor of Media Studies and African American Studies, for “Zora’s Legacy: Archiving Everyday Black Girlhood in the U.S. South.” Prof. Wade is undertaking a visual and oral history project to collect stories and document aspects of the lives of Black girls and women in two communities (Richmond, VA, and Kinston, NC). She aims to promote study of southern U.S. Black girlhood and to create a tool for teaching research methodologies in media studies. During her one-year fellowship, she will be collecting, annotating, editing, and publishing an initial set of interviews and associated resources, testing tools, developing best practices, and building a digital infrastructure that challenges and expands popular understandings of U.S. Black girlhood in the 21st century.

About IATH

IATH is a research unit established by the University of Virginia in 1992, now part of the University of Virginia Library. The team’s goal is to explore and develop information technology as a tool for scholarly humanities research. IATH’s research projects and websites are the products of a unique collaboration between humanities and computer science research faculty, independent historians and researchers, computer professionals, student assistants and project managers, and library faculty and staff.

IATH is part of the UVA Library’s Digital Humanities Center (DHC), with the Scholars’ Lab, a team that supports humanities scholarship in the digital arena with a more pedagogical focus. The DHC offers a wide range of support and information for digital scholarship and humanities research.