Do(es) Digital Humanities (DH) Transform American Studies on Both Sides of the Atlantic?

Abstract

Although the history of Digital Humanities (previously known as “humanities computing”) can easily be traced back to the immediate post-WWII years, it was only in 2009 that The Chronicle of Higher Education and several other journals and newspapers recognized DH as “the next big thing”—and then as “The thing” (Gold, 2012, p. ix). Yet, despite the proliferation of professional journals, conferences and other fora, DH was (or: has been) somewhat slow to make an overall transformative impact on the Humanities, at least at the level of methodology and epistemology (Brennan, 2017). More recently, similar concerns were raised by Richard Jean So, who also criticized humanities departments for their slow acceptance of data-driven and quantitative approaches (2021, p. 40). This overall sluggishness was noted in 2018 by Mari Yoshihara as well in the field of American Studies, when the editor of the leading American Studies Journal American Quarterly dedicated an entire issue to Digital Humanities with the clear objective of orienting the journal toward a “critically-aimed digital practice” (Yoshihara, 2018, pp. vii-viii). The aim of this paper is to explore in what contexts DH as a phrase has appeared since the early 2000s in the journal of the American Studies Association (ASA), the American Quarterly, and in the European Journal of American Studies (EJAS), published by the European Association for American Studies (EAAS). A similar comparison is made with respect to the available conference themes and topics of these two organizations to highlight the relative importance attached to DH by both professional bodies. The paper concludes that the American Association has been significantly more eager to embrace the methods and approaches offered by Digital Humanities, yet this activism has mostly been manifested in the areas of feminism and critical race theory.