Faculty for Digital Humanities Degree

Jonathan Banfill

Biography

Dr. Jonathan Banfill is an Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies in the Core Division at Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont, where he also directs the Global Studies Minor and the Freeman Foundation Asia Grant. Jonathan’s academic background is in Comparative and International Education, where he holds a PhD from UCLA’s School of Education and Information Studies. He also holds an MA in Comparative International Politics from American University in Washington, D.C. and a BA in Comparative History from University of Washington, Seattle.

Jonathan’s research and pedagogical practice is engaged in creating interdisciplinary interconnections between new trends in the humanities, social research on global and urban issues, and creative practices from art and design, via place-based and experiential education. He has a long-term interest in thinking about these issues specifically within the context of a transnational Asia-Pacific, but is expanding in more directions since relocating to Vermont. At Champlain, this means creating courses and pedagogical spaces that can combine students’ professional knowledge with a humanistic perspective that can address future changes and global challenges. Jonathan has lived, worked, and taught in places as diverse as Los Angeles, Beijing, Belfast, Pyongyang, Mexico City, Shanghai, Cape Town, and Tokyo.

Jonathan is a graduate of the UCLA Urban Humanities Initiative, an interdisciplinary research and training program funded by the Mellon Foundation that brings together humanities scholars, architects, and urban planners to study 21st century issues in cities in the Asia Pacific. He also served as a research and teaching fellow for the program and at cityLAB, an urban research think tank in the UCLA department of Architecture and Urban Design. More recently Jonathan is a co-founder of the Urban Humanities Network, which is supporting a new generation of Urban Humanities scholars and practitioners around the world.

At Champlain, Jonathan is Primary Investigator for a Champlain College subaward grant that is part of a larger Vermont EPSCoR proposal organized by The Vermont Complex Systems Center at the University of Vermont. This project, called The Study of Online, Collective Knowledge, and Stories (SOCKS), examines social narratives using Big Data and computational tools. Champlain College’s project focuses on the way that the soundscape has changed in Vermont and how Vermonters have talked about those changes over the last 150 years. Jonathan is a contributing faculty member for a National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Humanities Advancement (DHAG) grant that will be used to build infrastructure and contribute to faculty’s professional development for Digital Humanities tools. Finally he is a contributing faculty member to an ongoing multi-media research project funded by the Council of Independent Colleges Humanities Research for the Public Good grant that is investigating the history of Urban Renewal in the city of Burlington.

Jonathan is presently helping develop the new major in Digital Humanities at Champlain that will start in fall 2024.

Publications & Abstracts

Urban Humanities Pedagogy (2016) 

Favorite Quote

“If a scholar stays only in one place, then he or she will know no more than one song, their mind poor and pathetic. He ought to travel widely, observe how people live and how things work, understand customs and cultures across regions, learn of mountains, waters, and meteorology (cosmology), in order to extend their knowhow. This is how scholars are benefited from their experiences.”

—Hu Yuan (993-1059), Northern Song Dynasty Educator speaking about what we would now call interdisciplinary education. I am a descendent of Hu and try to put his ideas into practice in my teaching. Original Chinese quote translated by Dr. Weiling Deng.

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Weiling Deng

Biography

Dr. Weiling Deng is an Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Champlain College. She currently serves as the Core Division’s Third Year Faculty Lead and helps develop the new curriculum of Digital Humanities. Weiling received her Ph.D. in Social Sciences and Comparative Education from UCLA. Her research and teaching interests centrally address “a world in flux,” the ever-lasting, AI-infiltrated reality in which education, art, technology, and relationship are embedded. Weiling writes and teaches about Global Asias, Urban Humanities, panoramic and immersive media, generative education, higher education organizational change, gender and feminist studies, technology and race. Drawing from theorists like John Dewey and Paulo Freire, Weiling is dedicated to place-based international education through experiences of immigration, diaspora, border, and urban space.

Weiling is currently working on her first book project, titled Illuminating the Shadows of the Undead: Panoramic Fabulation of Transpacific Chinese Scenes. The book focuses on the speculative cinematic connections between Hollywood and Shanghai, Shenyang, and Beijing by way of Los Angeles’ DIY artist-built folk-art scenes. Built around the immersive art programs of a Los Angeles-based non-profit museum devoted to the illustrious history of proto-cinematic technologies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the book adopts multiple media—including 360-degree panorama, diorama, peepshow, shadow projection performance, crankie, theater, walk-in archival installation, photography, garden, and film—to re-enliven the alien/ated “China” stories on the geographical and cultural edge of Hollywood.

Weiling’s articles have appeared in Verge: Studies in Global Asias, Panoramic and Immersive Media Studies, in South Asian Review, Museological Review, Critical Digital Humanities Cookbook, Los Angeles Review of Books, and academic anthologies including Postcolonial and Postsocialist Dialogues: Intersections, Opacities, Challenges in Feminist Theorizing and Practice.

Weiling spends a lot of her time reading, writing, and traveling globally. She loves cities with well-curated bookstores and museums, cool architecture and art scenes, expansive public transportation, and grassroots immigrant neighborhoods — in particular Montreal, Dublin, Los Angeles, and Seattle where she continues to build professional connections and engage in community works. As an amateur photographer, she documents the intersection of urban life and urban ruins. She sees ruins — in higher education, industry, and the environment — as generative sites where relations are revolutionized, reimagined, and rebuilt.

Publications & Abstracts

Deng, Weiling. 2025. “Speculative Wuhan Panorama: Scaling Hydro-Urbanism from the Hankou Water Tower.” Verge: Studies in Global Asias, vol. 11, no. 2, special issue The Asian Century: Idea, Method, and Media, edited by Christopher T. Fan, Paul Nadal, Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan, and Tina Chen, 43-53.

“A Classroom Camera Obscura.” International Panorama Council Newsletter no. 48. June 2025, pp. 38-41.

Deng, Weiling, Sara Velas, Ruby Carlson, and Jonathan Banfill. 2024 “Relocating Shengjing: Traveling Panorama as Theory.” In Panoramic and Immersive Media Studies Yearbook Vol. 1, edited by Molly Briggs, Thorsten Logge, and Nicholas Lowe. Berlin: De Gruyter, 25-54.

Deng, Weiling, Sara Velas, Ruby Carlson, and Jonathan Banfill. 2024. “The Feral Garden of the More-than-Panorama Museum.” Museological Review, issue 27, Museums as Spaces of Rootedness and Response-ability, 136-155.

Deng, Weiling. 2023. “Death and Life in the Bordersand–Remembering the Chance of Living during Partition through Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand.” South Asian Review, vol. 45, no. 1-2, special issue Partition: 75 Years and Beyond, edited by Debali Mookerjea-Leonard and Nalini Iyer.

“The Chinese Restaurant on Main Street, U.S.A. – Review of From Chinatown to Every Town by Zai Liang.” Los Angeles Review of Books. September 2023.

Recommended Reading, Listening & Viewing

• Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing)
• The Intimacies of Four Continents (Lisa Lowe)
• Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals (Saidiya Hartman)

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Katheryn Wright

Biography

Dr. Katheryn Wright is professor of Interdisciplinary Studies and Digital Humanities. She is also the Director of Study Abroad. Dr. Wright earned her PhD and MA in Humanities from Florida State University in Tallahassee, FL where she specialized in Media Studies and Cultural Geography and a BA from Stetson University in DeLand, FL, where she studied English Literature and Studio Art (ceramics).

Distinctions & Awards

Roger H. Perry Endowed Chair for Innovation

Publications & Abstracts

The New Heroines: Female Embodiment and Technology in 21st-Century Popular Culture

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