Ashley Sanders Garcia is Vice Chair and a core faculty member in the Digital Humanities program at UCLA. She holds a Ph.D. in History with a specialization in Digital Humanities from Michigan State University and B.S. in both History and Mathematics from Western Michigan University. A comparative colonial historian, her research explores the development of settler colonies in the United States and French Algeria. Her first publication, “A Study of the Teaching Methods of High School History Teachers,” appeared in The Social Studies, a peer reviewed journal, in 2008. In addition to her manuscript, Between Two Fires: The Origins of Settler Colonialism in the United States and French Algeria (under consideration at the University of Nebraska Press), she is also the author or co-author of a number of publications in the field of digital humanities, including a chapter on building a DH program, which will appear in the forthcoming book Institutions, Infrastructures at the Interstices. Currently, she is working on two articles that she will submit to the International Journal of Middle East Studies. The first article explores the role of ethnicity, kinship networks and patronage in Ottoman provincial governance and sheds new light on the political economy of Algeria during the Ottoman Regency period. The second article is a close-reading of Algerian resistance leader Ahmed Bey’s memoir that explores local and exogenous definitions of indigeneity during the transition from Ottoman to French rule in early to mid-nineteenth-century Algeria.
To learn more about her historical research, check out her research site, Colonialism Through the Veil. She has also served as a full-time author for GradHacker, an Inside Higher Ed blog, and Michigan State University’s Cultural Heritage Informatics blog.
