Campus News

Stephen Berry and William Kretzschmar awarded 2013 American Council of Learned Societies Fellowships

Two faculty members in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences are among seven recipients nationally of the 2013 American Council of Learned Societies Digital Innovation Fellowships. Associate history professor Stephen Berry and English professor William Kretzschmar will spend a year dedicated to a major project intended to advance scholarship in the digital humanities.

The ACLS Digital Innovation Fellowship program supports digitally based research projects in all disciplines of the humanities and humanities-related social sciences. The program, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, marked its eighth year in 2012-2013.

Berry holds the Gregory Chair in the Civil War Era in the history department. His ACLS project, “CSI Dixie,” digitizes, transcribes, indexes and makes searchable coroners’ reports of four South Carolina counties for the years 1840-1880.

Kretzschmar is the Harry and Jane Willson Professor in Humanities in the English department. His project, “Computer Simulation of Speech and Culture as a Complex System,” develops a multidimensional computer simulation that can model and display the process of emergence and adaptation of regional language differences.