Emily Helen Boyer

Emily graduated from American University in Washington, D.C. in the fall of 2020, where she received a BA in History and a minor in Art History. She then attended Johns Hopkins University where she received a MA in Museum Studies in December 2022. For her project for the Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities (Northeastern University), Emily developed the “Signed, Sealed, and Delivered Project” (Ongoing). This project “seeks to use TEI encoding to better transcribe probate records of the 17th and 18th centuries, as these records are often marred by illegible handwriting, damage (due to age), or errors in the scanning process.” Her project can be found here. Emily’s current research investigates the formalization and the commodification of genealogical practices within the United States from the mid 19th century through the 21st century. In looking at companies such as Ancestry and FamilySearch, she critiques genealogy practices that do not consider non-biological family relations (fictive kinship), and how modern genealogy standards actively erase the histories of non-biological or community-based family units. Emily was recently awarded the Andrew W. Mellon Short-Term Fellowship at Massachusetts Historical Society (July 2026-June 2027), where she is researching Lemuel Shattuck (1793-1859) and the publication of his book A Complete System of Family Registration (1841, 1856). She hopes to use her research on Shattuck in her dissertation. Emily is currently the Special Issues Manager at Digital Humanities Quarterly, as well as an Encoder at Women Writers Project (Northeastern University).