Courtney Murray Ross

Professional Bio

Courtney Murray Ross is a Dual-Title PhD Candidate in the Departments of English and African American Studies and a #DigBlk Scholar at the Center for Black Digital Research (CBDR). Her research focuses on 19th c. African American Diasporic literature and archives and how those texts engage with Black feminisms, space/time, fugitivity, and liberation.

Her dissertation, “The Hold: Black Femme Formations of Space, Text, and Being in the Long Nineteenth Century,” examines how nineteenth-century African American editors and authors drew on the slave ship to illustrate how Blackness expanded and complicated concerns of space and identity in printed media. Such scholarship interests coincide with her digital humanities research and commitment to Black archives, accessibility, and agency at the CBDR. Since 2019, Courtney has worked on various committees and projects, such as the Colored Conventions Project, Douglass Day, and the Digital Exhibits team. Her digital humanities work has resulted in digital training at the University of Pennsylvania, the National Humanities Center, and Penn State, a fellowship at the Library of Congress, public humanities publications, and presentations nationwide and internationally.

The Department of African American Studies at Penn State, the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center, the Humanities Institute at Penn State, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and the American Antiquarian Society have supported her research. Her work has also received praise, notably from C19: The Society of Nineteenth Century Americanists. In 2022, she received an honorable mention for the C19 Rising Scholar Prize.