In Memoriam Ángel David Nieves

Ángel David Nieves was a Professor of Africana Studies, History, and Digital Humanities in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities (CSSH) at Northeastern University and is an Affiliate Professor in the Department of English and in the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs. He was Director of the Graduate Program in Public History and Director of Public Humanities in CSSH. Nieves authored An Architecture of Education: African American Women Design the New South (2018/2020) and co-editor of ‘We Shall Independent Be:’ African American Place Making and the Struggle to Claim Space in the U.S. (w/Alexander, 2008), both historical monographs. He recently completed a new volume in the Debates in the Digital Humanities Series (w/Senier & McGrail), People, Practice, Power: Digital Humanities Outside the Center (December 2021). His articles have appeared in American Quarterly; Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities; JITP: The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy; Places: A Journal of Design for the Public Realm; The Journal of Planning History; and in other scholarly journals. Nieves received his Ph.D. from Cornell University in the history of urban development and Africana Studies, an M.A. in socio-cultural anthropology and Women’s Studies from Binghamton University (SUNY), and a professional Bachelor of Architecture (B.Arch.) degree from Syracuse University.

Nieves served on the Boards of the Society of American City and Regional Planning History (SACRPH) and the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. He has previously served on the Executive Council of the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH), the Institute for Liberal Arts Digital Scholarship (ILiADS), the Board of the New York State Council for the Humanities, and on many other boards across the U.S. in various fields and professional organizations.

Dr. Nieves’s scholarship focused on the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, social justice, and technology in the U.S. and South Africa, and was at the vanguard of digital history publications and experimental online publishing platforms. Nieves has received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Historical Publications & Records Commission (NHPRC), and Yale University. At Hamilton College he raised over $2.7 million dollars (w/Simons) in research support for interdisciplinary digital scholarship. He is currently working on a digital book project, Apartheid Heritage(s): A Spatial History of South Africa’s Black Townships, that combines human rights violations testimony and 3D reconstruction technologies of sites destroyed by the apartheid-era regime. He was Lead Co-PI (w/Poiger; along w/PIs Cohen and Baumgartner) on a $500K Planning Grant from the Mellon Foundation for a project entitled Reckonings: A Local History Platform for the Community-Archivist. Reckonings seeks to disrupt the traditional top-down methods of conducting historical projects by including a process of community co-curation to ensure that history – through both analog and digital formats – is not only more accurate, but more encompassing of the trials and triumphs of our nation’s marginalized communities.

In June 2022 he co-directed the NEH funded Summer Institute “Engaging Geography in the Humanities,” with Drs. Liza Weinstein (Sociology/Anthropology) and Serena Parekh (Philosophy).