Jesse Draper

I’m married (20 years!) with three kids, a dog, and two cats and we live among a tribe of beautiful people in the Lansing / East Lansing Michigan area. I spent the 90s trying to be a rock star and the aughts getting an M.A. in American Studies and a PhD in 20th Century Urban American History.

I am a Core Faculty Member of the Digital Humanities program and an Academic Specialist in the College of Arts and Letters serving as the Executive Director for H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online (https://h-net.org), an independent, non-profit scholarly association that offers an open academic space for scholars, teachers, advanced students and related professionals. I began working with H-Net in 2013 as a Content Developer while finishing my PhD in U.S. History. I joined the organization as the Associate Director of Networks in October 2014, became Interim Executive Director in January 2020, and was appointed as the new Executive Director in November 2022.

My current research interests focus on Digital Humanities as a large-scale scholarly project. H-Net’s transition from listservs to a more robust content management system, the H-Net Commons (https://networks.h-net.org), has presented many questions about how and why scholars use digital spaces for research and teaching. This has prompted discussion about digital publishing, peer-review, and how to utilize these new platforms to meet the needs of scholars in an increasingly digital 21st century.

In 2023, I oversaw the release of a new Drupal 9-based platform for the H-Net Commons and am currently working to rebuild H-Net's Job Guide (https://www.h-net.org/jobs/home.php) in Drupal 9 while broadening employment opportunities for PhDs to include more robust and consistent Alt-Ac career opportunities.

H-Net's new host agreement with Michigan State University sees our home move from the History Department in the College of Social Sciences to the College of Arts and Letters where we hope to build new areas of collaboration with DH@MSU and Humanities Commons while maintaining our strong ties to the History Department.

I also teach courses for the university from time to time including:

• HST 812: History in the Digital Age, Spring 2024
• HST 203: U.S. History 1877 to Present, Spring 2023
• HST 201: Race and Labor in the Development of 20th Century Detroit, Spring 2016.
• HST 110: What We Want, What We Believe – #BlackLivesMatter Activism in Historical Context, Spring 2017.
• DH 340: Digital Humanities Seminar, Spring 2019-2020.