2021 CONFERENCE WORKSHOPS

AAIS 2021 included workshops on the following topics:

Community Outreach and Civic Engagement: workshop and roundtable
Friday, May 28 | 4:15pm-5:45pm

Convener: Gabriella Romani (Seton Hall University)

Presenters:
William Connell (Seton Hall University): “Associazionismo! Donor relations and Italian American Organizations.”
Jacqueline Reich (Fordham University): "Turning Community-Engaged Teaching into Community-Engaged Research: Strategies for Success."
Lina Insana (University of Pittsburgh): “Maximizing Classroom-Archive-Community Connections in Italian and Italian American Studies.”
Andrea Baldi (Rutgers University): "The MAT Program, Outreach, and the Challenges of Higher Education."

The purpose of this workshop/roundtable is to provide space for members to share their experiences (the good, the bad, the ugly) in terms of community outreach and civic engagement. There will be some prepared remarks to lead the discussion, and participants are invited to come prepared to discuss their own efforts or those they know have been successful.

Mentoring
Saturday, May 29 | 11am-12pm - Meeting 1
and
Saturday, June 5 |11am-12pm - Meeting 2
Conveners: Monica Seger (College of William and Mary) and Michael Lettieri (University of Toronto Mississauga)

In 2020 AAIS and AATI first conceived a collaborative Mentorship Program, which was unfortunately put on hold along with our joint conference. We are happy to now re-launch the Mentorship Program in conjunction with 2 workshop appointments at this year’s AAIS conference. Each one-hour session will begin with a ten-minute opening discussion of mentorship benefits, goals and strategies, followed by time for breakout conversations between participating mentors and mentees, to be paired in advance.

Digital Methodologies

Sunday, May 30 | 12pm-1:30pm

Convener: Valeria Federici, Postdoctoral Research Associate (Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art)
Presenter: Deanna Shemek (University of California, Irvine) - IDEA Digital Project (Isabella D'Este Digital Archive)

The aim of this hands-on workshop is to mainly introduce basic tools that can be used to start building a Digital Humanities project. Whether you work with text or images, or both, this workshop shows how to create a database, how to parse  data, where to find your data and how to visualize your dataset. No previous knowledge required. In addition, it includes an introduction to the theoretical and critical discussions that currently animate the field.

Dissertations 2021
Tuesday, June 1 | 9am-10:30am

Convener: Eva Del Soldato (University of Pennsylvania)

Working on a dissertation is always an intense endeavor and the Covid-19 emergency has created new, unexpected obstacles to research and writing. This workshop invites ABD students in comparing their experiences with dissertation work, so to identify challenges and solutions that can be helpful also in less difficult times. We would like to enlist your assistance with invitations to graduate students to the Dissertation Workshop. If you have students, or if you are a student who would benefit from this workshop, please contact Eva Del Soldato, the convener, (evadel [at ]sas.upenn.edu) with ‘AAIS DISSERTATION WORKSHOP’ in the subject line. Participants will be expected to submit, by May 9, a video presentation of no more than 8 min that provides a general overview of their dissertation and of how they approached research and writing in the past few months. In addition to viewing the video presentations of the other workshop attendees in advance of the conference, participants will meet during the conference week for a 75-minute event with the convener.

Professional Development and Post-graduate Careers Workshop
Thursday, June 3 | 9am-10:30am
Convener: Brian DeGrazia (Modern Language Association)

This workshop will explore a range of topics related to work and life after graduate school, from broader overviews of the humanities landscape and finding fulfilling work to nitty-gritty tips on things like writing a resume and conducting informational interviews. The session is mainly intended for graduate students and early-career scholars, but all are welcome!