Kath Burton (Co-director of CHC’s Humanities Communication Program – Scholar Communication Track and Public Humanities and Publishing Lead)
Kath Burton is a humanities and social sciences publishing and engagement specialist. Currently Development Director for the humanities journals program at Routledge, Taylor & Francis, Kath specializes in commissioning and program management and the design and implementation of effective publishing strategies for scholarly societies, journal editorial teams and research institutes. With Daniel Fisher-Livne, Kath is the co-founder of the Publishing and the Publicly Engaged Humanities working group, an informal gathering of scholars, publishers and librarians committed to championing the benefits of values-based scholarship and publication. She is a co-author of Publishing Values-based Scholarly Communication (2023), an OER included in the Scholarly Communications Notebook and sponsored by IMLS, and the Visual Storytelling about Community Food Growing handbook. As a member of the Advisory Board for the peer-reviewed journal Public Humanities (CUP) Kath pursues a radically hopeful approach to publishing in the humanities and in her private practice. Her voluntary work as a trustee at World Education Berkshire, combines publishing and food growing strategies to empower communities to share knowledge through digital storytelling practices. [Kath’s website]
Anke Finger (Co-director of CHC’s Humanities Communication Program – Scholar Communication Track; CHC Liaison with Science Communication Community)
Anke Finger is Professor of German Studies, Media Studies, and Comparative & Literary and Cultural Studies at U. Connecticut–Storrs. She is a specialist on the idea of the total artwork and debates on interart/intermedia in modernism (with a monograph, Das Gesamtkunstwerk der Moderne, 2006; and a collection of critical articles, The Aesthetics of the Total Artwork: On Borders and Fragments, 2011). New modernism projects focus on German Expressionism, with a book on Women in German Expressionism: Gender, Sexuality, Activism (2023) and on colonialism. A co-founder and co-editor (2005-2015) of the multilingual, peer reviewed, open access journal Flusser Studies, Anke Finger’s closely related scholarship in media studies originates from her work on the Czech-Brazilian philosopher Vilém Flusser. She co-authored the 2011 Introduction to Vilém Flusser, and she is a member of the Flusser project team (FlusserVision) at Greenhouse Studios. Comparative/interart literature and media studies also influence her work in intercultural communication. She edited Flusser’s The Freedom of the Migrant and co-edited KulturConfusão: On German-Brazilian Interculturalities (2015). Her latest book merging intercultural communication and media studies appeared in 2023: Bias, Belief and Conviction in an Age of Fake Facts (Routledge). She has held numerous administrative positions, including Section Head in German Studies, inaugural Director of the Digital Humanities and Media Studies Initiative (as Assistant Director of the Humanities Institute), and Director of Public Outreach for the Humility and Conviction in Public Life project (2016-2019). [Anke’s U. Connecticut web page]
Christine Henseler (CHC Co-President)
Christine Henseler is Professor of Spanish and Hispanic Studies at Union College, NY. She has served as the chair of the Department of Modern Languages & Literatures, as the Director of Faculty Development and the Director of the Latin American and Caribbean Studies, among other administrative positions. Christine is actively engaged in the advocacy of the arts & humanities on national and international fronts. She co-leads 4Humanities and continues to build a website called The Arts & Humanities in the 21st Century Workplace. She was a blogger for the HuffPost and actively publishes public opinion pieces in Inside Higher Ed and other outlets, often in collaboration with colleagues from different fields and professions outside of academia. Her recent edited volumes include: The Entrepreneurial Humanities: The Crucial Role of the Humanities in Enterprise and the Economy (co-edited with Alain-Philippe Durand; 2023) and Extraordinary Partnerships: How the Arts and Humanities are Transforming America (2020). She also designed a free flipbook for students called Arts and Humanities: Don’t Leave College Without Them (2022). [Christine’s home page]
Alan Liu (CHC Co-President)
Alan Liu is Distinguished Professor in the English Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has published books on Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford U. Press, 1989); The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information (U. Chicago Press, 2004); Local Transcendence: Essays on Postmodern Historicism and the Database (U. Chicago Press, 2008), and Friending the Past: The Sense of History in the Digital Age (U. Chicago Press, 2018). Recent essays include “Toward a Diversity Stack: Digital Humanities and Diversity as Technical Problem”; “Is Digital Humanities a Field?—An Answer from the Point of View of Language”; “N + 1: A Plea for Cross-Domain Data in the Digital Humanities”; and “The Meaning of the Digital Humanities.” Liu started the Voice of the Shuttle website for humanities research in 1994. He is founder and co-leader of the 4Humanities.org advocacy initiative, and Principal Investigator of the Mellon Foundation funded “WhatEvery1Says” project on public discourse about the humanities. He is also a co-leader of the Critical Infrastructure Studies initiative (CIstudies.org). At UCSB, he has in various years been Chair, Graduate Chair, and Undergraduate Chair of the English Department. He is also an affiliated faculty member of the UCSB Center for Information Technology & Society and the UCSB Media Arts & Technology Program; and a member of the Working Group of the UCSB Data Science Initiative. [Alan’s home page]
Elizabeth McDermott (CHC Associate)
Beth McDermott is an Associate Professor of English at the University of St. Francis in Joliet, IL, where she currently serves as Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences. Beth is interested in connecting students to the humanities through internships that develop their communication skills and assessing how such skills support students as they pursue their chosen career paths. The author of Figure 1 (Pine Row Press), a 2022 finalist for the Foreword Indies and a 2023 finalist for the da Vinci Eye/Eric Hoffer Award, and a chapbook titled How to Leave a Farmhouse (Porkbelly Press), Beth has a Ph.D. in English from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She has been an editor at Kudzu House Quarterly, RHINO, and Cider Press Review and currently serves as a preliminary reader for Tupelo Press.
Cheryl Sadowski (CHC Associate)
Cheryl Sadowski helps organizations and individuals to articulate their vision and value, create engagement, and increase demand through branding and storytelling strategies. She brings more than 20 years of marketing and communications leadership experience across a variety of organizations, including the Society of Interventional Radiology, Newspaper Association of America, (now News Media Alliance), National Recreation and Park Association, George Marshall House and Museum, Deloitte, and Dow Jones. Cheryl completed a Master of Liberal Arts at Johns Hopkins University. In addition to consulting, she advocates for the Liberal Arts and Humanities, and writes essays and reviews about art, books, landscape, and nature. Her words and reflections can be found on Instagram @cherylsadowski, or her website, cherylsadowski.com..
Isabell Sluka (Co-director of CHC’s Humanities Communication Program – Social Media Internship Program)
Isabell Sluka is a Ph.D. candidate (ABD) in German Studies at U. Connecticut–Storrs. She holds a Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree in Cultural Studies from Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Germany, as well as graduate certificates in Media Studies and Gender Equality from the University of Oslo, Norway. Isabell’s interdisciplinary research and teaching are deeply concerned with questions of social justice and the politics of belonging, particularly in relation to class, race and ethnicity. Her main research interests are 20th-21st century German literature and culture, media culture and participation, media activism, theories of culture and the public sphere. In addition to her PhD, she is pursuing graduate certificates in Human Rights and Indigeneity, Race, Ethnicity and Politics (IREP). From 2020 to 2023, Isabell served as a co-organizer of the “Decolonizing Area Studies” initiative. Prior to joining UConn, she worked as a German instructor and academic advisor at the Universidad Paraguayo Alemana in San Lorenzo, Paraguay. In her dissertation titled “From a Postmigrant Society to Radical Diversity: (Re)Negotiating Germanness in the Digital Realm,” Isabell investigates how digital media are used to contest current conceptions of Germanness, national identity and belonging. Based on the thesis that traditional mass media, and especially linear television, narrate Germanness in a very narrow and therefore exclusionary way, she argues that the digital realm, and specifically social media sites, provide the necessary platforms and tools to question this narrative and to (re)write conceptions of Germanness. Most recently, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, in collaboration with Greenhouse Studios, awarded Isabell the 2022-24 Graduate Assistantship in Digital Humanities. [Isabell’s U. Connecticut web page]
Stephanie Toxqui (Research Assistant)
Stephanie Toxqui is a student at Rutgers University, majoring in English with a minor in Foundations of Urban Education. She holds an Associate’s degree in Teacher Education from Passaic County Community College. Since 2024, Stephanie has served as a Student Support Intern at Braven, actively empowering college students with career-connected learning and instilling in them the confidence to enter their desired field of work. In 2023, she received an International Distinguished Research Project Award from the Phi Theta Kappa Honor Society for co-chairing a humanities-based undergraduate research project that explored constructs hindering students’ self-expression through play. Through her experience working in non-profit organizations and higher-educational spaces, she understands the value of using communication, collaboration, and community to uplift others. She strongly desires to aid and champion students in receiving interdisciplinary career guidance that aligns with their passions. As a Research Assistant for the CHC’s Talking Points Toolbox, Stephanie aims to support and advocate for humanities communications by curating accessible and diverse resources related to the humanities.