Re-mediating The Female American: Collaboration and Situated Knowledges in the Digital Humanities Classroom

Abstract

The Female American, published pseudonymously in 1767, has drawn scholarly attention in recent decades as a novel that raises questions about anonymity, gender, authorship, Indigeneity, settler colonialism, and the American literary canon. Yet access to the text has remained limited, dependent on subscription databases and print scholarly editions. In 2022, as part of a graduate seminar on eighteenth-century literature, science, and colonialism, we produced the first open-access digital edition of volume 1; a subset of the class also recorded a public domain audiobook of the full novel. This article presents an account of our process and the connections drawn between these projects and course content, with attention to conversations and tensions that arose as we drafted a land acknowledgment for the edition. Moving beyond the “how we built this” genre common in digital humanities, this article offers a critical reflection on the ways our individual interests, identities, commitments, and institutional embeddedness shaped the knowledge we could cocreate. Our aim is to demonstrate that the benefits of digital pedagogy extend far beyond technical skill-building—especially in graduate education, where digital projects provide an opportunity for emerging scholars to reflect critically on material and social entanglements that conventional humanities workflows often obscure.