Keynote Presentation

Rebecca Frost Davis, joined St. Edward’s University in Austin, TX, in July 2013 as Director of Instructional and Emerging Technology, where she provides leadership in the development of institutional vision with respect to the use of technology in pursuit of the university’s educational mission and collaborates with offices across campus to create and execute strategies to realize that vision. Instructional Technology helps faculty transform and adapt new digital methods in teaching and research to advance the essential learning outcomes of liberal education. Dr. Davis has explored the issue of access to technology both in the context of higher education, with the GEMs group, and also as a member of the group that created the Strategic Plan for Digital Inclusion for the City of Austin, the first such plan in the country. She now serves on the steering committee for that strategic plan. As the plan’s website explains, “The City of Austin’s 2014 Digital Inclusion Strategy is a dynamic plan to utilize community assets to overcome barriers, ensuring all residents have access to the skills and devices necessary to engage in our digital society.” Dr. Davis works to build networks to transform learning, specifically in digital humanities and at liberal arts colleges, but also more generally in higher education. As a fellow for the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education (NITLE), Dr. Davis researched intercampus teaching at liberal arts colleges and the role of networked courses in preparing students to live and work in a globally networked world. She likewise promotes collaboration in the digital humanities community. In “Divided and Conquered: How Multivarious Isolation Is Suppressing Digital Humanities Scholarship,” Dr. Davis and Quinn Dombrowski identify isolation as a chief challenge for humanities scholarship. With a group of digital humanists, she established DHCommons, a hub to help humanities projects and collaborators find each other. Dr. Davis holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in classical studies from the University of Pennsylvania and a B.A. degree (summa cum laude) in classical studies and Russian from Vanderbilt University