Stephen Robertson, a specialist in 20th-century U.S. history in the department and a leading scholar in the digital humanities, recently published his book, Harlem in Disorder: A Spatial History of How Racial Violence Changed in 1935. Since then it has earned recognition from multiple book award competitions.
First, The American Studies Association selected the book for the Angel David Nieves Book Award for Best Monograph. The prize "recognizes exceptional work that grapples with urgent questions that are specifically situated in practices of studying at the intersection of American Studies, Digital Humanities, and Digital Studies."
The book also received Honorable Mention for the Mary L. Dudziak Digital Legal History prize, from the American Society of Legal History. This prize is awarded annually to an outstanding digital legal history project. Finally, the book earned Honorable Mention from the Canadian Social Knowledge Institute's annual Open Scholarship Award. CSL created this award to celebrate scholarship that makes use of the digital medium to make scholarly work "more efficient, more accessible, and more usable by those within and beyond the academy."
Robertson’s book focuses on the violence that took place in Harlem on the night of March 19, 1935. The book makes use of digital tools to analyze in new ways the voluminous data surrounding the violence. In adopting the form of a digital monograph, Robertson’s work makes full use of the digital medium in order to move beyond what would have been possible in a print medium, and in the process offers new perspectives on an important historical event that has been frequently studied but not well understood. Reviewers of the book call it an “unprecedented accomplishment” and “a model for anyone planning to do a digital project.” Ed Ayers, one of the founding scholars in the field of digital humanities, calls Harlem in Disorder “a landmark in digital scholarship.”
February 27, 2026