POSITIONS
University of Colorado Denver, 2020 – present
Associate Professor Clinical Teaching Track, History Department
Director of Digital Initiatives, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, 2023 – present
Northeastern University, 2016-2020
Assistant Professor, History Department
Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, 2016-2017
Visiting Scholar
Rutgers University, 2015-2016
Andrew W. Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow, History Department
EDUCATION
Stanford University, 2009-2015
Ph.D. in American History
Pomona College, 2004-2008
B.A. in History, minor in Religious Studies
PUBLICATIONS
Paper Trails: The US Post and the Making of the American West (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021).
- Winner of the 2023 Vincent P. DeSantis Book Prize, Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era
- Winner of the 2022 Western Heritage Award for Outstanding Non-Fiction
- Winner of the 2022 National Postal Museum Award for Scholarship in Postal History
- Accompanying Website: Cameron Blevins, Yan Wu, and Steven Braun, “Gossamer Network” (2021), https://gossamernetwork.com
Cameron Blevins and Christy Hyman, “Digital History and the Civil War Era,” Journal of the Civil War Era, Vol 12, No. 1 (March 2022). [online]
“Sound and Community: ‘Singing Box 331’ as Digital History,” William and Mary Quarterly, 77, no. 3 (July 2020). [online]
“Into the Virtual Stacks,” Modern American History, 2, no. 2 (July 2019). [online]
“Women and Federal Officeholding in the Late Nineteenth-Century U.S.” Current Research in Digital History, vol. 2 (2019). [online]
“Digital History’s Perpetual Future Tense,” in Debates in Digital Humanities 2016, Matthew K. Gold and Lauren Klein, eds. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016). [online]
Cameron Blevins and Lincoln Mullen, “Jane, John . . . Leslie? A Historical Method for Algorithmic Gender Prediction,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 9.3 (2015). [online]
“Space, Nation, and the Triumph of Region: A View of the World from Houston,” Journal of American History, 101, no. 1 (June 2014), 122-147. [online][color pdf]
“‘Owned by Negro Venture’: Land and Liberty in the Life of Venture Smith,” in James Stewart, ed., Venture Smith and the Business of Slavery and Freedom (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010), 129-159. [WorldCat] [GoogleBooks]
GRANTS, HONORS, AND AWARDS
Co-Project Director, “Recovering Auraria’s Past: Building a Digital Tour of a Displaced Neighborhood and Reckoning with Campus History” ($149,197), NEH Humanities Initiatives at Colleges and Universities, 2023-2025
Vincent P. DeSantis Book Prize, Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, for Paper Trails: The US Post and the Making of the American West, 2023
Co-Principal Investigator, “Data Advocacy for All: An Open Access Digital Repository for Innovative Data-Driven Curricula” ($297,271), CU Next Award for intercampus pedagogical innovation, 2022-2025
ThinqStudio Faculty Fellowship, University of Colorado Denver, 2022-2024
Western Heritage Award for Outstanding Non-Fiction for Paper Trails: The US Post and the Making of the American West, 2022
National Postal Museum Award for Scholarship in Postal History for Paper Trails: The US Post and the Making of the American West, 2022
Runner-Up, Outstanding Western Book Award, WTAMU Center for the Study of the American West, 2022
Teaching Enhancement Grant, Center for Excellence in Teaching & Learning, CU Denver, 2022
Project Co-Director, “Engaging Geography in the Humanities” ($152,962), National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute, July 2020. [Postponed due to COVID-19]
Seedling Grant, NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks, Northeastern University, 2018, 2019
Team Member, NEH Digital Humanities Implementation Grant: Textual Geographies, 2016-2017
Thomas D. Dee II Graduate Fellowship, Bill Lane Center for the American West, Stanford University, 2014-2015
Centennial Award for Graduate Teaching, Stanford University, 2014
Research Grant, Graduate Research Opportunity Fund, Stanford University, 2013
Prize for Excellence in First-Time Teaching, Stanford History Department, 2010-2011
Research Grant, Presidential Fund for Innovation in the Humanities (Stanford University), Summer 2010
CONFERENCES AND PRESENTATIONS
“Building a Data Advocacy Curriculum,” Digital Pedagogy Institute, August 2023
“Integrating Geography into History Classes” on panel “History and the Spatial Turn: Pedagogical Approaches,” American Historical Association, January 2023
“Putting Lesbian Community Building on the Map,” on panel “Geography, Media, and Queer Community Formation,” (Panel Organizer) Critical Digital Humanities International Conference, September 2022
“The Unessay,” on panel “Beyond the Essay: Rethinking Student Assignments” (Panel Organizer and Chair) Organization of American Historians, April 2021
“Spatial Expansion and State Power in the Nineteenth-Century United States,” Networks: The Creation and Circulation of Knowledge from Franklin to Facebook, American Philosophical Society, June 2019
“Women and Federal Officeholding in the Late Nineteenth-Century U.S.” Current Research in Digital History, March 2019
“The Agency Model of the State,” on panel, “Reinterpreting the Nineteenth-Century State: Digital History’s Intervention” Organization of American Historians, April 2018
“What Gets Lost: Spatial History’s Disciplinary Shores,” Creating Spatial Historical Knowledge, German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C., October 2016
“Trickles and Torrents: Mapping the Female Consumer Revolution of the 1890s,” on panel, “Gendered Spaces of Western Commerce,” Western History Association, October 2015
“The Perpetual Sunrise of Methodology,” on panel, “Authoring Digital Scholarship for History: Challenges and Opportunities” American Historical Association, January 2015
“Mapping the American West through the U.S. Post,” on panel “The Place and Space of the Post,” Social Science History Association, November 2014
“Opening up the Dissertation,” on panel, “The Future of Graduate Education: The Digitally Informed Dissertation,” American Historical Association, January 2014
“Bodies in Motion: Women, Mobility, and the Overland Trail,” on panel, “Merchants, Emigrants, and Vacationers: Transplanting Gender from East to West,” Western History Association Conference, October 2013
“Digital Diaries, Digital Tools: A Comparative Approach to Eighteenth-Century Women’s History,” Women’s History in the Digital World, March 2013
“A Geography of Nineteenth-Century English and American Fiction,” on panel;”A Place for Text and Narrative in Humanities GIS I,” Social Science History Association, November 2012
“Slave Narratives in Space: Mapping the World of Venture Smith,” on panel “Networks, Maps, and Words: Digital Humanities Approaches to the Archive of American Slavery,” Modern Language Association Convention, January 2012
“Topic Modeling Historical Sources,” Digital Humanities 2011, Stanford University, June 2011
“Mining the Diary of Martha Ballard,” Berkshire Conference of Women’s Historians (Poster Session), University of Massachusetts-Amherst, June 2011
“A Midwife’s Tale in the Digital Age: Text Mining the Diary of Martha Ballard,” Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI), University of Victoria, June 2010
INVITED TALKS, WORKSHOPS, AND CONFERENCES
“Creating, contributing to, and/or using digital archives,” Business History Conference Midyear Event, September 2023.
“Data as Archives,” National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute: Archives as Data, Columbia University, June 2023.
“Paper Trails: The US Post and the Making of the American West,” Johns Hopkins University Digital Humanities Workshop, March 2023
Roundtable, “Graduate and Early Career Committee Open Forum: Pathways from Dissertation to Book” American Historical Association, January 2023
Roundtable, “Teaching Digital History: 10 Design Principles,” American Historical Association, January 2023 (cancelled)
“Information, Infrastructure, and the Geography of State Power,” keynote address for Processes of Spatialization under the Global Condition, Leipzig Collaborative Research Center, September 2022.
“Paper Trails: The US Post and the Making of the American West,” co-sponsored by the Center for Presidential History and the Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University, November 11, 2021. [video]
Roundtable Plenary Session, Current Research in Digital History, March 2019.
“Digital History and the Spatial Turn,” Massachusetts Institute of Technology, February 2019.
Commentator, Digital Research in Early America Workshop, William and Mary Quarterly-UC Irvine, October 2018
Participant, Arguing With Digital History Workshop, George Mason University, September 2017
“Data Literacy for Historians,” workshop for AHA Career Diversity for Historians, University of New Mexico, February 2016
Participant, Western History Dissertation Workshop, University of Washington, May 2014
Participant, Sorting the Digital Humanities Out, Umeå University, December 2013
Participant, NEH Advanced Institute for Spatial Narratives and Deep Mapping, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, June 2012
Participant, Institute for Enabling Geospatial Scholarship, University of Virginia, May 2010
“Combating Modern Slavery in the Digital Age,” Abolishing Slavery Then And Now, New York City, June 2008
“Land And Liberty in the Life of Venture Smith,” (keynote address) Documenting Venture Smith Conference, Haddam, CT, October 2007
REVIEWS
Project Review, Outliers and Outlaws: Eugene Lesbian History, in Reviews in Digital Humanities, 4, 3, March 2023. [online]
Book Review, Philip Rubio, Undelivered: From the Great Postal Strike of 1970 to the Manufactured Crisis of the U.S. Postal Service, in Business History Review, 96, 2, Summer 2022. [online]
“The Spatial Framework of Nature’s Metropolis,” part of roundtable review “Nature’s Metropolis at 30” in Commonplace: The Journal of Early American Life Journal, December 2021. [online]
Project Review, The Programming Historian, in The Journal of Interactive Technology & Pedagogy, December 2015. [online]
PROFESSIONAL SERVICE
Reviewer, International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing, 2016, 2022
Grant Reviewer, NEH Office of Digital Humanities, 2016, 2018, 2022
Reviewer, Current Research in Digital History, 2020, 2022
Reviewer, Digital Humanities Quarterly, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2021
Reviewer, Journal of Policy History, 2021
Reviewer (Open Peer Review), American Historical Review, 2020
Reviewer, Cultural Analytics, 2020
Reviewer, Population Research and Policy Review, 2020
Reviewer, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 2018
Reviewer, Environmental History, 2017
Reviewer, History Compass, 2015
Reviewer, Literary and Linguistic Computing, 2011-2012
Workshop Coordinator, Visualizing Complexity and Uncertainty, Stanford Humanities Center, 2011-2012
Coordinator, U.S. History Workshop, Stanford History Department, 2011-2012
Graduate Representative, Stanford History Department, 2010-2011
Co-organizer, Tooling Up for Digital Humanities, Stanford University, 2010-2011
Organizing Committee, THATCamp Bay Area, 2010
INSTITUTIONAL SERVICE
Director of Digital Initiatives, CU Denver College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, 2023-present
Working Group on Artificial Intelligence, CU Denver College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, 2023.
Working Group on Microcredentials, CU Denver, 2023.
Interim Director of Digital Initiatives, CU Denver College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, 2023.
Core faculty member for the Digital Studies Certificate, CU Denver College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, 2020-present.
Standing Committee on Digital Proficiencies and Quantitative Methods, College of Social Sciences and Humanities, Northeastern University, 2019-2020.
NULab Working Group on Digital Minors, Northeastern University, 2018-2020.
NULab Subcommittee on the Digital Humanities Graduate Certificate Program, 2018-2020.
College of Social Sciences and Humanities Research Working Group, Northeastern University, 2018-2019.
Advisory Board Member, Northeastern Humanities Center, 2017-2019.
TEACHING
Introduction to Digital Studies, CU Denver, Spring 2021, Spring 2022, Spring 2023
U.S. History Since 1876, CU Denver, Fall 2020, Fall 2021, Fall 2022
Theory and Practice of History: An Introduction to the Major, CU Denver, Spring 2021, Fall 2021, Fall 2022
History Seminar (capstone for the History Major), CU Denver, Fall 2020, Spring 2022
Data: A User Manual, CU Denver, Fall 2021
Civil War and Reconstruction, Northeastern University, Spring 2019, CU Denver, Fall 2020
Digital Space and Place (graduate), Northeastern University, Spring 2018, Spring 2020
Introduction to U.S. History, Northeastern University, Fall 2018, Spring 2020
Texts, Maps, and Networks: Methods and Readings in Digital History (graduate), Northeastern University, Fall 2018, Fall 2019
History of the Western U.S., Northeastern University, Spring 2018, Fall 2019
History and Trump, Northeastern University, Fall 2017
Mapping the Past: A Spatial History of the United States, Rutgers University, Spring 2016
Graduate Peer Teaching Mentor, Stanford History Department, 2013-2014
The Digital Historian’s Toolkit: Studying the West in an Age of Big Data, Stanford University, Autumn Quarter 2012 [course site]
Teaching Assistant, Global Human Geography (Martin Lewis), Stanford University, Winter Quarter 2012
Co-Instructor, Tooling Up for Digital Humanities, Stanford University, Spring Quarter 2011 [course site]
Teaching Assistant, Nineteenth-Century America (James Campbell), Stanford University, Winter Quarter 2011
Teaching Assistant, Colonial and Revolutionary North America (Caroline Winterer), Stanford University, Autumn Quarter 2010
Updated: 8/11/2023