About Dani
Dani Willcutt is a PhD Candidate in the History Department at Michigan State University where her current focus is U.S. Food and Labor History. Her dissertation work is titled, Serving it Up in the Capital City: Restaurants, Labor, and Restaurant Labor in Lansing, Michigan: 1963-2008, and focuses on the role of restaurants and restaurant labor in a Midwestern, rustbelt city. Dani is also completing the Digital Humanities Graduate Certificate. She has been a graduate assistant in the Lab for Education in and Advancement of Digital Research (LEADR) for multiple semesters, teaching workshops on using digital tools and research methods to students from a variety of disciplines, including History, Anthropology, Archaeology, and Chicano & Latino Studies. Dani was also a Cultural Heritage Informatics (CHI) Fellow in 2019-2020 and a Senior Fellow 2021-2022. Her first project was a digital version of A Domestic Cook Book (1866) by Malinda Russell using Twinery. The text is the first commercially published book written by an African American woman that we know of and her story, Dani thought, should have a digital form. Dani’s next project was a web-based map for tourists to follow a guided map of Lansing’s culinary history, leading participants through an interactive tour. The trail is currently under construction and being revamped to include a platform for oral histories of Lansing-area restaurant workers that Dani has collected through her dissertation research.
