Currently Assistant Professor and Public Humanities Fellow, Brown University
Monica Martinez is working on two public humanities projects: “Refusing to Forget,” which memorializes the state-sanctioned racial violence on the Mexico-Texas border from 1910 through 1920 that prompted a struggle for justice and civil rights that continued throughout the century. In collaboration with the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum and the Texas Historical Commission, this effort will result in a multiyear series of historical marker unveilings, public lectures, and an exhibit “Life and Death on the Border, 1910-1920” at the Bullock Museum in January 2016. Martinez is also developing an interactive platform that recovers and makes visible lost and obscured histories of racial violence in Texas from 1900 to 1930. Mapping Violence will enrich current understandings of histories of racial violence in the humanities, offer a model for using digital technology to present findings in the humanities to wider publics. Mapping Violence addresses fundamental questions on the best practices for visually representing histories of racial violence to a broad audience: How does one visually represent a history of loss? How does one visualize a database of events of racial violence for a public audience? What are the best methods for giving faces and names to the dead and to those who lived in the wake of state sanctioned violence? This interdisciplinary project is at the intersection of ongoing conversations in the fields of American Studies, US History, Ethnic Studies, Digital Humanities and Public Humanities that explore how best to narrate histories of racial violence in the United States.