Conference Co-Chair

Taylor Spence arrived at this, his fifth year as a doctoral candidate in Yale’s History Department, after having been an artist and muralist for seventeen years (you can see his work at www.taylorwyoming.com). Painting large public projects in fresco forced him to engage with the power that stories have in the lives of people and their communities. In his historical research and writing he has thus been interested in unearthing and describing the ways that large, ideological social movements behave in people’s daily lives. His dissertation is called The Liberal Schoolmaster and explores the way that liberalism fomented social disturbances in the antebellum Northern border region. He expects to graduate in 2011. His interest in the digital humanities has a very practical bent; it has come from using the ever-evolving set of digital tools in the many hours of his scholarly research.