CDHI Visiting Speaker Series: Jacqueline Wernimont

CDHI is pleased to welcome our first Visiting Speaker of 2023–2024: Dr. Jacqueline Wernimont! Professor Wernimont’s talk is titled “When is Death Official? Sociotechnical Entanglements with Human Mortality”

As in life, death in the modern world is everywhere entangled with social and technical infrastructures. What it means for a death to be officially registered with government differs from what it means within a close community. This talk will explore how gender and sexuality in particular feature in paperwork of mortality and why those particular features matter and for whom.

About our speaker: Professor Wernimont is the Distinguished Chair in Digital Humanities and Social Engagement and an Associate Professor in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Dartmouth. She specializes in long histories of digital media, histories of quantification, and technologies of commemoration. She is an active part of the FemTechNet collective. Jacque’s book, Numbered Lives: Life and Death in Quantum Media (MIT Press, 2018) traces long histories (21st century to 16th century) of particular technologies like wearable devices, body measurements, and body counts. With Elizabeth Losh, she also co-edited Bodies of Information: Feminist Debates in Digital Humanities, which is part of the University of Minnesota Debates in Digital Humanities series. Jacque cut her digital humanities teeth at the Brown University Women Writers Project, where she began as an encoder and later worked as the project manager and textbase editor.