Comparative American Studies

Digital & Media Projects

Digital humanities projects encourage interdisciplinary work in which students in the Comparative American Studies Program interact with people in various parts of the college including the Allen Memorial Art Museum, the Oberlin College Media Center, the Environmental Studies Program and the Terrell Main Library.

These projects also reflect our program’s commitment to developing and sustaining meaningful engagement with community partners in Oberlin, Lorain, and throughout Northeast Ohio and are an important way to share and disseminate knowledge produced through these relationships.

We encourage students interested in the digital humanities to explore the projects CAS students and faculty have developed and to become part of the ongoing conversations about how to continue to use new media to enhance student learning, creativity, and engagement.

Past Projects

  • Tempered to Resistance
    CAST 210: Sanctuary, Solidarity, and Latina/o/x Practices of Accompaniment
    Spring 2017

By Belkis Moreno and Casey Troost, including collaboration from Levi Reyes and Colby Fourtin
This podcast explores the experiences of Salvadoran migrants as they seek sanctuary in the United States beginning in the 1980s. The podcast uses oral history interviews, as well as archival and secondary sources, to explore the experiences of Belkis Moreno's family as well as other Salvadoran migrants as they relocated to Houston during the Salvadoran Civil War.

By Rachel Marcus, Mikala Jones Callie Howard and Abby Parker
This podcast locates the development and continued importance of Program Houses like African Heritage House and Third World House at Oberlin College.  Students use archival data from the Oberlin College archives, as well as oral history interviews to explore the social and political contexts for the rise of program houses at colleges like Oberlin and to discuss their ongoing importance and relevance today. 

  • Visual Productions: A Dialogue on Identity and Sexuality 
    CAST 202: Visible Bodies and the Politics of Sexuality
    spring 2017

    Visual Productions explores visual representations that turn to the body to uphold or question social ideals about identity, sexuality, power and oppression. Students curated the six exhibits that contain a rich collection of media including architecture, photography, painting, music film and video. Exploring diverse subject matter—from advertisements to Disney princesses and fashion design—the exhibits address how normative ideals about race, gender, sexuality, class and ability produce ideal body standards.
    Beyond that, the exhibits ask, how do artists, musicians, filmmakers and others disrupt or challenge those ideals to provide different ways of seeing bodies and identities. Finally, Visual Productions calls attention to the role of the curator in selecting and presenting images, in shaping what we see and, in so doing, how we come to understand the worlds around us.

  • Latina/o Oral History 
    CAST 335
    spring 2016

  • CAST/HIST 260 
    Asian American History
    spring 2015

    History of Asian American Food  by Ellie Lindberg, Talia Nadel, and Jacqueline de Leeuw Huang
    Asian Americans in film and media  by Tracy Wong, Jack Goldberg, Tony Popenoe, Christina Ruggiero Corliss, Frankie Hullet, and Kelliann Doyle
    Taiko in the Asian American Diaspora  by Holly Hoang

  • Capturing the Body: Ownership and Resistance in Visual Culture
    CAST 202: Visible Bodies and the Politics of Sexuality 
    fall 2015