About

Jim Casey is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies, History, and English at Penn State University. He is the associate director of the Center for Black Digital Research. He earned his PhD in English from the University of Delaware and held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton University.

Casey specializes in nineteenth-century African American Studies, periodicals, and print culture, with particular emphasis on the early Black press. He is currently completing a book project on The Invention of Editors. He is co-editor, with P. Gabrielle Foreman, of The Colored Convention Movement: Black Organizing in the Nineteenth Century (UNC Press 2021). He is president of the Research Society for American Periodicals. His work is available or forthcoming in American Periodicals, American Literature, Civil War History, Criticism, Computational Humanities Research, and Current Research in Digital History alongside edited volumes such as Frederick Douglass in Context (ed. Michael Roy), and Against a Sharp White Background: Infrastructures of African American Print (eds. Jonathan Senchyne and Brigitte Fielder).

Dedicated to collaborative scholarship, his work spans current and emerging areas of Black digital humanities and public humanities. Recent publications and ongoing projects focus on critical data studies, archives, and crowdsourcing. Among other projects, he is co-founder and co-director of Colored Conventions Project and Douglass Day.