Headshot of Dr.Robert  Nelson

Dr. Robert Nelson

Director, Digital Scholarship Lab
  • Profile

    Robert K. Nelson is the Director of the Digital Scholarship Lab and Head of Digital Engagement in Boatwright Library. He is the editor of American Panorama: An Atlas of United States History, which includes "Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America." American Panorama received the 2019 Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Innovation in Digital History from the American Historical Association and was named a tech innovation by the Chronicle of Higher Education's in 2016; "Mapping Inequality" received Honorable Mention for the 2019 Garfinkel Prize from the American Studies Association's Digital Humanities Caucus. Other digital history projects that Nelson has developed include Mining the Dispatch and a remediated, enhanced version of Charles Paullin's 1932 Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States. Nelson teaches course related to antislavery and slavery in the United States and about the digital humanities.

  • Publications
    Journal Articles

    "'The forgetfulness of sex': Devotion and Desire in the Courtship Letters of Angelina Grimké and Theodore Dwight Weld," Journal of Social History 37 (Spring 2004): 663-679

    "Debating Manliness: Thomas Wentworth Higginson, William Sloane Kennedy, and the Question of Whitman" (co-authored with Kenneth M. Price), American Literature 73 (September 2001): 496-524

    Additional Publications

    "Of Monsters, Men—and Topic Modeling," New York Times Disunion Blog, May 29, 2011