Jamila Moore-Pewu

As a public and digital historian Dr. Moore Pewu is invested in sharing, complicating, and preserving African Diasporic spatial practices. She has a special interests in collaborating with artists/makers, scholars and local communities to reimagine the physical and ideological landscapes that shape their everyday lives. This includes directing several public humanities projects including: Reimagining Little Liberia: Restoration and Reunion. (2017). This exhibit brings scholars and artists together to tell the story of an endangered 19th century Black and Native American historic site. The exhibit is currently on view at the Housatonic Museum of Art in Bridgeport CT.  Other projects include the use of digital tools and technologies to visualize historic and contemporary spatial practices including the legacy project: Mapping Arts OC.  (2018), and its version.2 redesign Art of the Matter. (currently in development), which preserves and critically engages spatial narratives and public art practices.  Dr. Moore Pewu is also the new Executive Director of The Museum of the City, a virtual museum and training incubator established in 2006 about the world's cities - past, present, and future.  She also served as co-PI on the Andrew Mellon funded Digital Ethnic Futures Consortium (2021-2025) which established a national network of regional comprehensive universities and minority-serving institutions developing undergraduate-focused digital humanities initiatives centered on ethnic studies and community engagement.

As a first-generation student, Moore Pewu is invested in creating public humanities pathways for historically underrepresented students and community organizations. She has written about this work in the essays “Digital Reconnaissance: Re(Locating) Dark Spots on a Map,” and “Centering First-Generation Students in the Digital,” published in The Digital Black Atlantic  (2021) and People, Practice, Power: Digital Humanities Outside the Center. Dr. Moore Pewu also created and led the Digital Ethnic Studies initiative (CSUF Digital) at California State University Fullerton for nine years, and served as a leader and founding member of the California Statewide DH across the CSU Consortium (DH@CSU).

Dr. Moore Pewu joined the Department of American Studies at the University of Maryland to expand her commitments to African Diasporic digital and public humanities, community-engaged research praxis, and digital history. At UMD, she organizes the Public Humanities Collective, an informal working group for practice oriented graduate scholars. She also serves as an advisor for the Journal of Public Humanities and as a topic editor for the “Community-Engaged Digital Humanities” area of Reviews in the Digital Humanities, a peer-reviewed journal and project that supports the scholarly evaluation and dissemination of digital humanities work.

Moore Pewu is currently preparing to launch, Archiving Black OC, a community-stewarded digital archive and data storytelling project documenting Black life—past, present, and future—in Orange County, California through a living platform designed to shift and remap itself in response to the community it documents.